There is something very other about this strange subspecies, the British aristocracy, this relic of feudalism. I have written about them quite a lot, but thought it would be fun to gather it all together and recount anecdotes of my personal encounters with them.
The Duke of Westminster, when asked by a journalist what advice he would give to a young entrepreneur, famously suggested “‘make sure they have an ancestor who was a very good friend of William the Conqueror.” This was Gerald Grosvenor, the sixth duke, descended from Gilbert le Grosveneur (which translates as chief or fat huntsman), a relative of said William the Conqueror. The present duke is number 46 in Forbes’ list of the world’s richest people. The family owns the large Eaton Hall estate – getting on for 11,000 acres – open to the public just three times a year – and has extensive holdings in Belgravia and Mayfair. Horse racing features prominently in the family history. As does marrying well, a vital element of the aristocracy’s continuation, as is heredity of course. Not just marrying well though – intermarrying has been common, not least amongst the royal families of Europe, leading to such deformities as the Habsburg jaw. Also I suspect the genetic trait which has led to these people being referred to as “chinless wonders”. Our late queen and her husband were third cousins. Victoria and Albert were first cousins.
The word “aristocracy” is borrowed from the French, in turn from the Greek, meaning ruling by the elite or the best. What we have instead is rule by the worst of us. The word first appeared in English according to the Oxford English Dictionary in the late eighteenth century. Another term is “blue-blooded” which has especially nasty origins and sits comfortably alongside the fascist leanings of some of this elite as we shall see. Blue-blood comes from the Spanish sangre azul, originally referring to old, rich and powerful Castile families who proudly claimed never to have intermarried with other races, giving them fair complexions and visible blue veins, which smacks of Aryanism.
Primogeniture has been important too, as I wrote in Animal Trust:
The various Inclosures or Enclosures Acts, over the centuries, put land ownership and power into the hands of the few, displacing and removing the rights of local people who had often farmed their land for generations. It was the political sway of large landowners which enabled them to redistribute the land in their own favour. Not entirely dissimilar to the fate of the American Indians now on their reservations, the peasantry were immediately and hugely disadvantaged, offered smaller and inferior plots of land and a life of abject poverty. This land grab and power shift were further reinforced by the aristocratic rule of primogeniture (the rule of inheritance whereby everything passes to the firstborn or the firstborn male child) which ensured that those large estates were never broken up into smaller parcels.
My elder daughter has recently finished a superb dissertation on the Greenham women (Greenham Women Everywhere) from which I learnt many things. Included is a quote from Audre Lorde, the social justice campaigner, philosopher, poet and feminist: ““the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”, which seems as appropriate here as in its original context.
I wrote about Lord Sudeley in Animal Wild, who seems to have been a particularly unpleasant specimen:
Lord Sudeley was another interesting character who penned a letter to the press arguing for the retention of “hereditaries” in the House of Lords on the grounds that “The essential flaw of democracy is its failure to safeguard minority interests such as farming, foxhunting and the countryside.” His full name was Merlin Charles Sainthill Hanbury-Tracy, 7th Baron Sudeley, he went to Eton and Oxford and was President and Chairman of the so extremely right-wing Monday Club that even the Tory party disassociated itself from it. Vice-Chancellor of the International Monarchist League, an admirer of Hitler (“He did well to get everyone back to work.”), staunch racist (“True though the fact may be that some races are superior to others …”), President of the Traditional Britain Group[1], he listed one of his hobbies in Debrett’s as “Ancestor Worship”. The title was first created in 1299 and was inherited by the present, eighth baron, in 2022.
[1] From Wikipedia: “TBG was founded in 2001. It opposes non-white immigration to the UK and, prior to Brexit, it opposed the UK’s European Union membership. The organisation’s stated principles include opposition to egalitarianism; the centrality of the heterosexual family as the primary social unit; traditional Christian values and maintaining the Church of England as England’s established church; rolling back of the welfare state; and opposition to immigration, multiculturalism, political correctness and Marxism.” Even Jacob Rees-Mogg apologised for speaking as guest of honour at their 2013 annual dinner.
Extraordinary stuff. I devoted an entire post to the Drax family:
“All wild animals have to be culled” – Animal Wild
I also wrote this in Animal Trust:
We came across a ‘drag’ hunt on a sett survey day, alerted by the dying scream of a muntjac and the baying of the hounds. One of our number, to be fair, was less than temperate, and I said nothing for fear that the red mist would descend, but another of us had a quiet and reasonable discussion with the gamekeeper and the terrierman. No views were changed, unsurprisingly. But I much liked my friend’s point that whilst it is indeed a supposedly free country, we are all stakeholders in the countryside, and consumers of its produce, whether they like it or not. As they rode past us on their beautiful horses, I looked up at them, adults and small (miserable looking) children. They really did seem to be of a type, to the extent that I found myself wondering if they were some sort of subspecies, born without the compassion gene.
My first awareness of these people and their estates came from my mother, who was a bit obsessed with “stately homes” and we used to tour the buildings and their gardens somewhat relentlessly. It was in the 1980s though that I got up close and personal. I worked at Sotheby’s, the auctioneers, for eight years, in their book department and a good deal of our time was spent valuing country house libraries or even being involved in country house sales when entire contents would go under the hammer. I will spare him any blushes, but my lovely immediate boss Roger G. was uncharacteristically and overtly disrespectful in these situations. He had said to one grande dame on arrival that he loved her house. “Oh, you wouldn’t like it, the maintenance, the bills, it’s all too much.” “Do you know what, I reckon I could handle it, my entire street could fit in your driveway.” One particularly arrogant young owner interrupted to us to wonder why we were taking so long to value his books, most of which bore the bookplates of his various forbears. “Oh, we’re just trying to work out which one of you lot it is that’s important”, said Roger. I have cherished those moments ever since.
I visited a lot of these places in this way and am a bit vague on the details. One belonged to the Bastard family, another major beneficiary of the Norman Conquest. I think it was a young scion of theirs that got the second of the Roger treatments above.
This may all sound like class envy, but that’s not it. I genuinely would hate to be one of them. They seem completely to lack self-awareness, fail to see that they are so often caricatures of themselves. There are the louche, languid types, and the full-on blustering bullies. I can muster a pretty good upper-class accent, usually beginning with the word “yes”. If you slightly drawl and elongate the word “ears”, it’s spot on.
I can’t remember which duke it was now (possibly Rutland), but as I dictated my notes into a tape machine, reeling off titles, I pronounced Belvoir (as in Belvoir Hunt) the way it looks as though it should be. The duke was shocked. “It’s beaver, dear boy, beaver.” I once asked how ordinary people were supposed to know whether an aristocrat called Ralph was to be pronounced ‘Rafe or ”Ralf’, and for that matter how they knew. “Oh, one just does.”
At the Duke of Northumberland’s gaffe I really didn’t cover myself in glory. At lunch(eon) the duchess was discussing a new young gardener who had recently been sacked. Think appalled Lady Bracknell tones: “He was growing cananabis in the garden.” I am afraid I burst out laughing. It was a day of consecutive minor disasters, farcical really, and I feared that I would be in for a talking to back at the office. Luckily I was able to redeem myself in the end by noticing that the walls of the library against which the bookshelves and the books directly rested were extremely damp and mould was starting to get into the books – they were very grateful.
My strategy generally on my visits was to make sure that the first person I befriended on the doorstep was the dog, or dogs. That would endear me to the wife (usually the chief actual decision maker), and consequently the husband. Working with another colleague at one of these places, we had just ascended the massive staircase and started along the landing. The lady of the house emerged from a room to one side and was followed by what I can only describe as a moving carpet of at least 100 Pekingese dogs. As they passed by, my colleague Ruth screamed. “One of your dogs has just bitten my ankle!” She was completely ignored. They are good at blithe indifference and zero empathy, these people.
Another constant factor was alcohol, and I don’t mean the occasional snifter. In some cases it was a bottle of gin for breakfast and then never really stop. One such family was the Mayalls. Robert, sadly no longer with us, used to work for my father. He was a good soul really and certainly not arrogant, but he was perpetually hung over. When I visited and saw his mother knocking back the gin at an alarming rate, I saw instantly where all his problems came from. His father was Sir (Alexander) Lees Mayall, a diplomat and a denizen of the cocktail circuit. The daughter of another ambassador (Venezuela I think) worked as a secretary for the architectural bookseller Ben Weinreb. She had spent some time at the embassy over one summer and I asked her how her holiday had been. Without irony, but also without self-aggrandising intent, she said, “Oh it was terrible. The servants kept forgetting to take the lilos out of the pool at night.”
Matthew Festing was Sotheby’s representative in the north-east. His brother is a portrait painter and I got to know one of his nephews who lived in our village for a while. Matthew was typical of his well-born kind in many ways, full of bluster and a bit of a bully on the surface, but there was something gentler and self-mocking underneath all that and I couldn’t help liking him. He lived with his mother in a pretty grand lodge (is that the right word?) on a large estate. Sotheby’s staff were sent off on tours of the country to try to drum up business, often holding open days, giving out free valuations, a bit like the Antiques Roadshow. It might sound like fun but a full week of it could get pretty stressful. Staying at Matthew’s, I stepped outside for a cigarette after supper. At the end of the garden I could hear the pretty burbling of a stream. I went back in and said how nice it must be to have that natural sound as a constant background. Matthew jumped up, went outside and held one hand to his hear. He had lived in this place all his life. “Oh yes, that’s jolly nice, never noticed it before.”
A friend of mine in the village was trying to describe someone we both knew to me: “You know, the one with those Etonian good looks.” I immediately knew exactly what and who he meant, although it is not something precisely definable. There’s that certain bearing too.
I also visited George Sassoon, son of Siegfried Sassoon the poet and novelist, at Heytesbury House, to help to value and ultimately sell his father’s library. There were pigeons flying around in the upper servants’ quarters, long since abandoned – money had clearly become tight. I liked him too. By his own account he made ends meet by locking himself away in a shed for a few days with a crate of whisky and emerging with a new invention, most recently at the time a very successful new aid to nautical navigation. My head of department Roy Davis and I had taken along Wilf Johns, ineffable head porter for the department at the time. He was a wonderfully iconoclastic figure. He was there to do some of the heavy lifting for us. At one point I said to Roy, “Actually, where is Wilf?” Then I noticed a plume of smoke arising from a grand armchair with its back to us. George had settled Wilf down with a glass of whisky and a fine cigar.
George was still very much in denial about his father’s homosexuality – there was a whole room full of correspondence and photographs relating to his long affair with Stephen Tennant, which we forbidden to enter (but we caught a peek). Tennant was a ‘bright young thing’, decadent and eccentric. He was partly an inspiration for Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited. Cataloguing his library at Wilsford House was an extraordinary experience. The grandeur had rather faded but I remember a great deal of silver foil on the walls and a seashell theme pretty much everywhere.
Finally the Pakenhams. The best-known is probably Lord Longford, the seventh earl, one of whose daughters is Lady Antonia Fraser whom I got to know through the sale of her and her husband Harold Pinter’s archives. He became notorious for his penal reform campaigning, which included petitioning for the release of Moors murderer Myra Hindley, naively perhaps, and although involved in the decriminalisation of homosexuality in this country he strongly disapproved of it on religious grounds and was a Section 28 supporter. Lady Antonia was always extremely kind to me.
It would be absurd to say that the landed gentry are all bad and I hope I have highlighted a certain affection for some of them above. Eccentricity is allowed to flourish and I like eccentricity. Some of the self-importance and sense of entitlement are perhaps inevitable if born into such extreme wealth and privilege. They can be genuinely oblivious to the effects of their cruelty I think. Often they are just laughable and ridiculous, on the surface at least (some like Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson deliberately play up to this, making themselves seem harmless). Sometimes they can be charming. But 1066 was a long time ago. It is manifestly absurd and a travesty of democracy that they, benefitting from what was pure and simple land theft, still hold so much influence and power today.
The illustrations here, showing Eaton Hall and Alnwick and Belvoir Castles, are chromolithographs from our own copy of Francis Orpen Morris’ A Series of Picturesque Views of Seats of the Noblemen and Gentlemen of Great Britain and Ireland with descriptive and historical letterpress, six volumes, c.1880, which we used to sell over and over again at Sotheby’s. Clearly demand has fallen off – we have had our copy for years. Dealers used to break the books and sell the prints but I think the customer base of every house depicted (forty per volume) has been exhausted.
The Reverend Francis Orpen Morris, it has only just occurred to me, is the very same as the author of the fabulous A History of British Birds, A Natural History of the Nests and Eggs of British Birds, A History of British Butterflies and A History of British Moths. Not only I have used illustrations from the first of these in this blog, we used to sell all of these titles at Sotheby’s all the time. How did I not make the connection? The subject matters seem very disconnected from one another I suppose. Morris it seems was not a popular man, noted for his irascibility. He refused to accept Darwin’s theories and was anti-feminist, but he did despise fox-hunting, any other destruction of wildlife and vivisection and was a champion for animal welfare. So definitely not all bad.
This copy has an armorial bookplate, appropriately enough, which we have been unable to trace. Vigilans means vigilant, no doubt a family exhortation, but perhaps it serves better as a warning to the rest of us.
See also my two part review of Guy Shrubsole’s The Lie of the Land:
Guy Shrubsole. The Lie of the Land. Book review. Part I – Animal Wild
Guy Shrubsole. The Lie of the Land. Book review. Part II – Animal Wild
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