The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House 1918-1939
by Adrian Tinniswood, Jonathan Cape, £25
The standard image of the English country house between the wars is one of decline, be it gentle or abrupt. Properties were “deserted and dismantled and demolished”, while families, missing heirs and husbands because of the 1914-18 conflict, struggled to cope with the “psychology of loss”. Adrian Tinniswood sees some truth in this but also reminds us of an alternative narrative of survival and vibrancy.
At Longleat, the Marquis of Bath had to sell off 8,600 acres of land between 1919 and 1921 and, poor chap, his indoor staff halved to just over 20, but the result was “not exactly life in bedsit land”. The 11th Duke of Bedford still kept four cars and eight full-time chauffeurs in London to ferry guests to his country pile, Woburn Abbey. Others, clearly admired by Tinniswood, struggled to cling on to former grandeur, “hoping against hope that the bank wouldn’t foreclose and the dry rot wouldn’t spread”.
There was new blood, too: American heiress brides and newly wealthy pseudo-squires for whom houses were “shrines in which to pursue the cult of the antique”.
A few braver souls embraced Modernist architecture, though this tended to outrage council planning committees and the whole business seemed “dangerously un-English”. Perhaps most famously, the “ABC of Art, Bohemia and Culture” invaded certain country houses, causing minor ripples of scandal and replacing all the “tweeds and guns and panting retrievers”.
Tinniswood paints a vivid portrait of the period, full of ambitious interior designers and architects, hard-pressed domestic servants, and young ladies who were still told to avoid artichokes because it was impossible to eat them delicately.
The romantic rural idyll was not displaced but the houses also witnessed the arrival of “new aesthetics, new social structures new meanings to an old tradition”. I’m not usually one to feel sorry for toffs, but it must have been hard to sense the “lovely, lazy, languorous tedium” of the country house party slipping away.
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