G.M. Trevelyan spotted it in September 1939. He feared, he wrote, that the England ‘of an old song’ was coming to an end. By that, as Judith S. Lewis explains in her account The Country House at War, he meant ‘a green and pleasant land presided over by intelligent and benevolent aristocrats’.
Courtesy of Hitler that upper-crust world, so addictively dramatised in Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey, would indeed be forced to endure bombs, rationing and dilapidations as much as anyone else. It was a dearth of male heirs, the haemorrhaging of compliant staff, fiscal assault and social change which gave singularity to the problems facing these large and historic buildings.
Hitler’s war was to demand sacrifices and impose hardships on the general population in a way that, as destructive as it had been, the Kaiser’s had not. Those who struggled between 1940 and 1945 to keep their heads above water had little sympathy to spare for the monied (whether old or recent), landed classes and harboured suspicions they were not doing their bit. Yet, it was also true that they accepted that the architectural and cultural riches and beauty of houses such as Audley End, Castle Howard, Hatfield House and Panshanger were – and are – irreplaceable national assets.
Their occupants often fought hard to keep them going in wartime conditions, but odds were against them. Some of their male owners were enmeshed in the war effort. Some died on the battlefields. The women left behind were hamstrung by lack of staff. Females were barred from inheriting and, if the male owner died or was killed and there was no direct heir, the law of entail uprooted widows and daughters – the very people with intimate knowledge of how the unit worked.
Of necessity, the government was ruthless in requisitioning many of these houses all over the country. It drove a hard bargain, offering minimal compensation and demonstrating an indifference to the owners who could be, without notice, evicted and told to live elsewhere. Others witnessed their homes transformed into training camps, schools, housing for evacuee children, hospitals and – the stuff of novels – cordoned off from the public to hide the training of secret services, such as the SOE.
By 1946, it was obvious the emotional and practical bonds between the owners and great houses had been recast and different arrangements for their preservation and upkeep had to come into play. ‘Regarding a home as a commodity,’ writes the author, ‘provided more flexibility and less responsibility in the economy and society of the New Song.’
The author is not unsympathetic to the upheavals experienced by the families although she is properly concerned at the way women were disenfranchised in the inheritance stakes. In tracing this moment in the lives of these important places and those who loved them, she has written a fascinating, beautifully detailed and very readable social history.
Elizabeth Buchan is an award-winning and bestselling writer, and the author of Woodspring.
