Goodbye to all that

On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the guns fell silent. The Great War, which many had confidently expected to be over by Christmas 1914, in fact lasted for just over four years. It was an immensely costly conflict, and Britain emerged from the war a debtor nation, while in the longer term the country’s economic future would be bleak – and Prime Minister Lloyd George’s promise to the returning troops of “homes fit for heroes” would remain largely unfulfilled.

Many aspects of British life were changed by the war and the combination of economic, social and cultural change that came with it. Country-house life would never be quite the same. The leisured, moneyed existence that many landowners had enjoyed before the war would never return – and those who had experienced it would look back on the Edwardian age with nostalgia, as a high point of elegance and prosperity. 

The lavishness of pre-war country-house life is conjured up evocatively in the memoirs of Lady Muriel Beckwith, née Gordon Lennox, published in the 1930s. In When I Remember: a Reflection of the Golden Age, she describes growing up at Goodwood House in Sussex and Gordon Castle at the heart of the Gordon Lennox family’s Scottish estates. She recalls the glamour of race week at Goodwood, the richness of the hospitality, and shoots in Scotland where the family might host three separate shooting parties at the same time – at the Castle, and at a house and nearby lodge in Glenfiddich.

“We were born in a fortunate hour,” she wrote, “when the insecurities and haunting cruelty of war had not destroyed the leisure, the spaciousness, and the dignity of the country- house life. The young of today, brought up in the post-war atmosphere of reduced incomes and enforced retrenchment, of taxation which is almost strangling the great estates, can hardly imagine life as it was lived in the early days of 1900.” 

Yet in 1918, in homes rich and poor, it was the young men killed, missing or seriously wounded that was the most tragic aspect of war, and one that would cast a long shadow over the succeeding century. Thousands of men had rushed to volunteer when war broke out on August 4, 1914, but by 1916 conscription had to be introduced as yet more soldiers were needed for the killing fields of the Western Front, where a war of stasis was being fought in the terrible conditions of trench warfare. It was estimated that 10 million died worldwide, while nearly three million British troops were killed or wounded. But the officer class died in disproportionate numbers in trench warfare – and whatever charges had been levelled at the “idle rich” in the years prior to 1914, George Orwell noted that the traditional ruling class proved “ready enough to get themselves killed”. Lady Curzon later recalled: “England lost the flower of her young men in those terrible days... There was scarcely one of our friends who did not lose a son, a husband or a brother.” 

At the end of the war then, the rooms of many country houses (as with more humble dwellings) had grown silent with grief, where previously they had been alive with the high spirits of the family, including the young men who were to die or be mortally wounded. But untimely death also had economic consequences. In numerous cases, death duties – sometimes multiple death duties within the same family – devastated the fortunes of land-owning families. Many had already been hit hard by the great agricultural depression of the 1880s and ’90s, in addition to the consequent fall in the price of land and rents, combined with the increase in taxes and death duties. All this further threatened the position which their owners held in society as owners of great estates. 

The engine of these great houses was changing too. The vast numbers of servants previously used to keep up a country house and its estate were simply no longer available. During the war, men were called up. Many working-class women went to work in munitions factories or offices, where they earned a great deal more than they had “below stairs”. When peace came, many of these women were reluctant to return to domestic service with its low pay and many restrictions. Those included “no gentlemen callers” and only half a day o a week from their long hours, spent at the beck and call of frequently ringing bells, summoning a servant to respond to a member of the family’s needs in double-quick time.

The attitudes of young, upper-class women were also changed by the war. Many had served as nurses; Lady Muriel, for example, trained as a nurse and worked at Gordon Castle, which became a military hospital during the war, looking after the wounded soldiers convalescing in the grand rooms where the Gordon Lennox family had previously entertained their house guests. Some would be reluctant to relinquish the idea of a career and would take up the slowly emerging opportunity of worthwhile jobs and more freedom away from home. Others would seize a different kind of freedom during the following decade, living hedonistic lives as “bright young things” – a sharp contrast to both their wartime lives and the formal, straight-laced restrictions of Edwardian upper-class life. 

War and social change impacted on the Gordon Lennox family directly. After penning her “Reflection of the Golden Age”, Lady Muriel Beckwith would go on to write recipe books, in itself a departure from the social mores of her aristocratic childhood, according to which hostesses were not expected to know how to cook. Grief also came to Goodwood, at the very start and in the aftermath of the conflict, with the 7th Duke losing both a son and a grandson.

Career soldier Lord Bernard Gordon Lennox died in November 1914 in the early months of trench warfare in Flanders. Charles Gordon Lennox, Lord Settrington – in line to succeed his grandfather and father as Duke of Richmond – succumbed to gangrene on a hospital ship, having been wounded in the 1919 British intervention in the Russian Civil War. Then, to the consternation of his parents, Charles’s younger brother, Freddie, who was next in line, quit Goodwood House, with its Gobelin tapestries and ancestral portraits, to learn a skill and work as a mechanic with Bentley Motors, refusing to return home even when his parents cut off his allowance. 

Ultimately, his lifelong love of all things automotive would offer the Goodwood Estate a new lease of life. But in both Goodwood and Gordon Castle, things would get worse before they got better, and that Edwardian era of elegance – that opulent whirl of house parties and balls and shoots – was drawing to a close. The reason was partly economic. In 1938, Frederick Gordon Lennox, by now 9th Duke of Richmond and 4th Duke of Gordon, had to sell off Gordon Castle to pay the crippling death duties. But the mood had also changed. As Lady Muriel put it, from the war onwards, “cheese-paring [being careful with money] became not a vice but a virtue”. She also devotes an entire chapter in her memoirs to what
she calls “The Passing of the Grand
 Manner”. This was “a thing rather to be 
experienced than put into words”. Or 
perhaps seen, by comparing the posture 
and clothes in the group photographs 
from two house parties at Goodwood –
in the 1900s and in the 1930s. For Lady 
Muriel, the Grand Manner was a world 
of stiffness and formality, especially
with social inferiors, and of “dowagers in massive tiaras” delivering ruthless snubs to social climbers or women they deemed fast. “Nowadays all this is changed.” And Lady Muriel, for one, didn’t miss it.

The economic pressure on landowners in the 1920s and 1930s was a genuine concern. With the price of agricultural land continuing to fall and taxes on the rise, many country houses faced bankruptcy or, at best, an endless struggle to survive. This, of course, was the era when Noël Coward sang:

The Stately Homes of England,

How beautiful they stand,

To prove the upper classes

Have still the upper hand;


Though the fact that they have to be rebuilt
And frequently mortgaged to the hilt
Is inclined to take the gilt O the gingerbread,

And certainly damps the fun Of the eldest son –

But still we won’t be beaten, 

We’ll scrimp and scrape and save,
The playing fields of Eton 
Have made us frightfully brave –

And though if the Van Dycks have to go
And we pawn the Bechstein Grand,
We’ll stand
 By the Stately Homes of England. 

Ultimately, not everyone could stand by their stately homes. For those country-house owners who felt they could no longer afford to hang on to their ancestral seats, there were limited options. The house could be sold – and transformed into a boarding school, or a hotel, or in later decades, a conference centre. Or perhaps it might be bought by “new money” – by plutocrats with a taste for the country-house life. Another choice for the impoverished country-house owner was to give the property to the National Trust – founded as early as 1895 – which would save many country houses by taking them on in the middle decades of the 20th century.

But hundreds of houses were demolished by owners unable to imagine a future for them in an era of high income tax and high death duties – their collections dispersed in massive country- house sales. During the 20th century, at least 1,000 country houses were demolished in England, and 200 in Scotland after1945 alone. Some owners knocked down parts of their houses in an attempt to make them more manageable. This happened at Woburn, for example, and at Goodwood House, where in the late 1960s the 10th Duke reluctantly removed the north wing, which was riddled with dry rot. Part of Gordon Castle was also demolished after World War II, having fallen into disrepair. 

But Woburn Abbey, Goodwood and Gordon Castle also show how some country-house owners were able to devise ways of changing the economics of the country house and its estate. To encourage tourists through the door, the owners of country houses needed to offer more than the opportunity to appreciate the architecture, gardens and ne interiors – and needed to present more ambitious activities. Safari parks were developed at Woburn and at Longleat. Gordon Castle’s fortunes were revived when another branch of the Gordon Lennox family bought it and restored it. They now run the castle as a luxury destination, offering superb fishing as well as accommodation. 

The Goodwood Estate would undergo its own transformation, and once again nourishes as a key part of the local economy. Goodwood always had one key advantage: its long-established reputation for horse racing. For generations, Glorious Goodwood and other race meetings have drawn large crowds. Edward VII tried never to miss a race, nor fail to place a bet on a horse – often successfully. Then, as early as 1901, the 6th Duke of Richmond chose to throw open the Estate yet further, inviting a nearby golf club to relocate to Goodwood where a short 18-hole course was laid out. Golf, shooting and other activities on the Estate expanded under the 9th and 10th Duke, while organic farming was introduced by the now Dowager Duchess during the 1980s.

In the 1940s, the 9th Duke brought a different kind of racing – and a different kind of horsepower – to Goodwood. The former mechanic and racing driver turned the perimeter road around the decommissioned RAF airfield on the estate into a Formula 1 racetrack. That came to a close in the 1960s, but Festival of Speed, and then Revival – along with the year-round activities both o -road and on the motor circuit – drew inspiration from Goodwood’s automotive heritage. Ironic, then, that Frederick Gordon Lennox’s passion for cars, which his parents had thought so unsuitable for the heir to Goodwood, but which his grandson the 11th Duke shares, would prove so instrumental in making the Goodwood Estate today a flourishing concern.

Juliet Gardiner is the author of “Wartime”, “The Edwardian Country House”, “The 1940s House”, “The Thirties: An Intimate History”, and a memoir, “Joining the Dots: A Woman In Her Time”. 

This article is taken from the Goodwood magazine, Winter 2018 issue