I’ll admit I approached Adrian Tinniswood’s The Power and the Glory: The Country House Before the Great War with a certain degree of trepidation. I felt like a despised day-tripper tourist seeking to unlock the secrets of the great and the good.
I need not have worried. Tinniswood, rather with the air of an impeccable butler assuring the visitor that all will be well, welcomes the reader into a world of glamour and mad extravagance that march, sometimes uneasily, side by side. Whichever stately home door he opens, he has an enjoyable story about the residents – some of whom appear to appeared to live an otherworldly existence.
His first chapter, Power and Pride, had me crying with laughter as he introduces us to the “architectural peccadilloes” of the fifth Duke of Portland, owner of Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire. It is 1879 and the sixth duke has just inherited Welbeck and wants to bring his family there. The agent does his best to discourage the duke, but he insists. On arrival, the new owner soon finds out why. “The drive was covered in builder’s rubble, and planks had been laid down so that the carriages could reach the front door.” Inside, there was a welcoming party of the house steward, the clerk of works, and some servants. “But there was no floor,” Tinniswood tells us.
It turned out that Duke No 5 had become obsessed with privacy in the last two decades of his life, and had embarked on deranged building projects at Welbeck and his townhouse in London’s Cavendish Square. “The gardens of his townhouse were overlooked by the neighbours; so he wrapped them – the gardens, not the neighbours – in an enormous high screen of frosted glass. He didn’t like the idea of meeting others when he travelled up and down to London by train; so he had his carriage lifted onto a railway truck, and kept the green silk blind tightly drawn for the entire journey.” At Welbeck itself, the doors to the Fifth Duke’s apartments had double sets of brass letter boxes marked “in” and “out”.
Below ground was a vast network of tunnel and hidden passages, including “a building which had once been used as stables which now held the kitchens from where food was lowered by a lift onto a heated truck which was pushed on rails by one of the menservants along another underground passage for 150 yards until it reached the main house.”
My favourite part of this lunacy was the skating rink, presided over by a servant whose sole job was to look after the skates of various sizes. But the duke “didn’t want to meet anyone walking in the same tunnel as himself”, and so if he happened to bump into a servant sweeping the corridors, “he packed them off to the skating rink”.
Tinniswood magically conjures up a world in which the country house set were limited only by their funds – certainly not their imagination. And in his Cosmopolitans chapter, British Jews, carefully settling into the empire’s society, were just as eager to join the showing-off, building their own flamboyant structures and acquiring fabulous collection of artworks and curios.
Tinniswood makes it clear that there was rampant antisemitism among the upper classes and the newly wealthy alike, and few – even those who ended up entertaining Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales – escaped some hateful criticism.
One who had cause to enter some of these Jewish-owned stately homes was architect Eustace Balfour, brother of politician Arthur Balfour (he of the later Balfour Declaration). He was not impressed, Tinniswood tells us, “with Alfred de Rothschild’s faux-French Renaissance Halton House”.
Not impressed? Eustace wrote: “I have never seen anything more terribly vulgar. A combination of French chateau and a gambling house… Oh, the hideousness of everything, the showiness! The sense of lavish wealth thrust up your nose!”
Among the Jews who became country house owners at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th were not just Rothschilds, but members of the Sassoon family, Maurice de Hirsch and Sir Ernest Cassel, several of whom were part of the Prince of Wales’ set.
He liked gambling, horse racing and shooting – so, in turn, did his Jewish hosts, some of whom became embroiled in the prince’s financial affairs.
On Maurice de Hirsch’s death in 1896, rumour had it that he had left the prince a million pounds in his will. Its executor was merchant banker Ernest Cassel, who obeyed de Hirsch’s instructions to write off all the prince’s debts. “It was a one-sided arrangement,” writes Tinniswood. “The prince took the profits from his investments, while Cassel took the losses.”
There is a devastating description of two days of shooting game at Hall Barn in Buckinghamshire, the home of Lord Burnham.
He had started life as Edward Levy-Lawson, one of Edward VII’s “many Jewish friends”, and became owner of the Daily Telegraph.
All of these country house pursuits, the luxury and the over-indulgence and the endless bitchiness about minorities – not just Jews but also those from the British Raj – vanished almost overnight with the outbreak of the First World War. Servants were recruited in their millions and the lifestyle became untenable: the “golden age” was over as owners “rushed to offer their country houses to the war effort as hospitals and convalescent homes”.
Oh, but what a golden age. And what a wonderful bird’s eye view Tinniswood gives us. It is, my dears, the only way to travel.
The Power and The Glory by Adrian Tinniswood
Jonathan Cape, £25
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