← HistoryExtra podcast
HistoryExtra podcast
The golden age of the country house
00:39:43
Adrian Tinniswood offers a vivid snapshot of country house life at the turn of the 20th century, when uber-rich elites splashed their cash on extravagant homes
Loading summary
Transcript27 lines
- [00:01]
Adrian Tinniswood
This episode is brought to you by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The speed and processing requirements of AI are expensive. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers one consistent price and four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds. So you can train AI models at twice the speed and less than half the cost. Do more and spend less like Uber 8x8 and Databricks Mosaic. Take a free test drive of oci@oracle.com HistoryExtra Want to shop Walmart? Black Friday deals first Walmart plus members get early access to our hottest deals. Join now and get 50% off a one year annual membership. Shop Black Friday deals first with Walmart plus see terms@walmartplus.com the holidays are here at the Home Depot. If you're working on getting ready for company, a lot of company, make sure you're ready with Black Friday savings. Get up to 40% off select appliances plus up to an extra thousand dollars off select kitchen appliances. Upgrade your kitchen with top brands like GE Profile and get cutting edge appliances to make sure you've got hosting handled. Yeah, you do get Black Friday savings now with free delivery and financing on select appliances. This holiday at the Home Depot offer valid November 6 through December 4 US only C store Online for details this episode is brought to you by Amazon. The holidays are here and you know what that means. It's time to get your friends and family the gifts they deserve. Take the stress out of shopping with Amazon's great deals and low prices on a huge range of items from toys to tech and much more. Whoever you're gifting for, Amazon has great prices on everything you need this holiday season. Shop Black Friday week starting November 21st.
- [01:44]
John Baulkham
Welcome to the History Extra podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Britain's country houses enjoyed something of a renaissance. No longer were stately homes seen as only the preserve of stuffy landed gentry, but an entirely new class of industrialists and foreign elites, each keen to showcase their wealth and be the kings of their own castles. In today's episode, John Baulkham talks to the historian Adrian Tinniswood about the rise of the country house lifestyle during this period, covering everything from interior design to resident ghosts.
- [02:31]
Jack Bateman
Your new book is about the British country house in the years before the Great War, which you describe as effectively being something of a golden age for these properties and the people that lived in them. Why, in your opinion, was this a positive time?
- [02:47]
Adrian Tinniswood
I mean, I think to say one thing straight away, John, it was a positive time and a negative. You know, it was the Best of time, it was the worst of times. In lots of ways, it felt, to the people living through it, it felt good. I mean, this is a point where Britain is ruling, what, a quarter of the globe, and it's a prosperous age for so many country house owners. But at the same time, there are kind of storm clouds gathering on the horizon. My book starts in 1870, so it covers that sort of 44 year period right up to the outbreak of the First World War. And that's a long period and it's a period of change. But you've got, at the beginning of it, you've got the agricultural depression starting to kick in and some of the big landowners having to sell off. We start to see a churn in estates. So there are kind of wobbles. But at the same time, it's a tremendously confident period. It's a tremendously confident age, right from royalty right down to the nouveau riche industrialist who's finally made his pile of money and bought himself or built himself a damn great country house. So the prosperity, the confidence, the kind of joy in building and in living in a house, because let's face it, if you were a member of the family and you weren't a tweenie or a scullery maid tucked away in the basement, if you were a member of the family, it was a great place to be.
- [04:12]
Jack Bateman
Who would you say then was the typical country house owner during this time?
- [04:18]
Adrian Tinniswood
I'll tell you something, John, straight away you put your finger on one of the most peculiar features that I came across in my research, which is that there is no typical country house owner. What surprised me, and what continues to surprise me is what a diverse bunch the country house owners of Britain were around about the turn of the century. Sure, you've got the traditional owners. You've got the Dukes of Devonshire at Chatsworth, you've got the Dukes of Marlborough at Blenheim, and you've got, you know, the retired majors, the country house owners with their shooting sticks and their spaniels and their small Georgian piles. But you've also got an amazingly different collection, an eclectic collection of country house owners. We have the nouveau riche industrialists, men like William Armstrong at Cragside, you know, one of the great late Victorian country houses. And Armstrong is a. Starts out as a lawyer, but he's an inventor, he's an engineer, he's an armaments manufacturer, he's a shipbuilder. And, you know, he in lots of ways typifies that, that stereotype, if you like. Of the nouveau riche industrialist making his pile, moving up the ladder, becoming part of the county. Then you've got Americans moving in. You know, we all know about the bartered brides, we know about the Consuelo Vanderbilts and the marrying for money, the status. But we're less familiar, I guess, with the men who came over, Americans like William Waldorf Astor, who first bought Cliveden House. And then having announced to America that America was no place for a gentleman, earning in the process the undying contempt of his countrymen, he moves over to England, he buys Clifton and then he buys Hever, you know, which is an impossibly romantic pile of a place. This is where, you know, the Boleyn family lived and William Wolderfasta becomes more English than the English in lots of ways. Or we've got Andrew Carnegie Dumfermlin born, but, you know, a Pittsburgh steel magnate, phenomenally rich. He comes back to Scotland to the land of his birth and he becomes more Scottish than the Scots. Not only does he rebuild Skibbo Castle as a wonderful example of that turn of the century pile, but he even sort of, you know, he wears tartan, he does Highland flings, he employs a full time piper to serenade his guests. And he had dozens of house guests all the time to serenade his guests at 8 o'clock in the morning. I'm sure they were really delighted to hear the sound of the bagpipes outside their bedroom windows. We've got the Rothschilds, like Ferdinand Rothschild, like Alfred Rothschild at Halton, who in the face of a powerful trend of antisemitism, I think, in British society, nevertheless create a sort of macro, you know, a sort of society of their own, which is both admired and criticized by the British establishment. You know, everybody wants to go to Waddesdon or Halton or one of the big Jewish houses and everybody's snide about them, about their opulence and their wealth behind their backs. It's rather nasty strain in British landed society at the turn of the century. And of course we have outsiders like famously Duleep Singh, the last Maharaja of the Sikh Empire, who is ousted from his throne as a boy, is brought over to England and who buys himself with pension from the British government, buys himself Elverton in Suffolk, one of the great shooting estates, and never quite becomes part of British society, but certainly is on the fringes and is very definitely a host that everybody wants to spend time with.
- [08:10]
Jack Bateman
So I suppose it's part of being seen to be with the in crowd, but still There is this sense, perhaps then, of otherness.
- [08:16]
Adrian Tinniswood
Yeah. I think a lot of the change comes from the set that gathers around Edward as Prince of Wales and then as Edward VII, of course, from 1901. You know, Edward is much more open. The Marlborough House set that gathers around him is much more open to incomers. You know, Sir Ernest Castle, who's basically the Prince of Wales banker, is an Ashkenazi Jew from Eastern Europe, and there are a number of Jewish friends of the prince and later the king, and people mutter about that. People don't think that's quite the thing. As One of Edward VII's hangers on, Edward VII is supposed to have asked him, you know, if he knew the importance of Being Earnest the Wild Play, and this chap said, no, he didn't. But he knew the importance of being Ernest Cassel because, you know, Cassel is the King's banker. He does literally bankroll Edward as Prince of Wales and as King. And that opens up society in a way. If the prince, the King is perfectly happy to accept into his inner circle Jewish bankers, Americans, nouveau riche industrialists, that if he can do it, the idea is that we should do it, too.
- [09:31]
Jack Bateman
And are many country house owners building from scratch or are they buying old ancestral homes?
- [09:39]
Adrian Tinniswood
Both. Very definitely, both. Most country house owners take 1900, let's say in 1900, most country house owners are living in houses that have been built for a century or more. Most country houses are old. If you're an incomer and you want a country house, well, the agricultural depression means that they're starting to come on the market rather more frequently. You can buy yourself a slice of England's past, as Astor does at Hever Castle. But a fair number of incomers build their own country houses. A surprising number. It's very hard to say how many. The late Mark Girard and Clive Aslitt, between them, reckon there were probably about 270 new country houses built between 1870 and 1914, either built or massively remodelled. You know, enough to be new. They both admit that their gazetteers aren't complete, and I would say you could at least double that. 270. I'm sure five or six hundred new country houses were built in the period 1870 to 1914. Some of them were outrageously flamboyant. You know, one thinks, for example, of the Marquess of Bute at Cardiff Castle. Not exactly a country house, but still far too wonderful to miss out. Goodness me, what a sp. You know, if anybody is listening to this and they haven't been to Cardiff Castle. Stop what you're doing now and go. Just go. It is one of the most remarkable pieces of whimsy of fantasy that I know in anywhere in the world. And it's the product of a relationship between the marks of Bute, who at one time is the richest man in the world. You know, he owns Cardiff docks, he's fantastically wealthy, and William Burgess, who's talented, who's eccentric, who has a penchant for opium, which comes out in a lot of his work, in fact. And between them, they remodel Cardiff Castle, the Butte's ancestral seat in the center of Cardiff. And it's incredible what they do to it. I mean, they just turn it into. It's bonkers. It's just like Camelot. It is the only house I know anywhere where the duckbill platypus is used as a decorative motif. I mean, it doesn't get any better than that, John, does it? It doesn't do. You know, in the dining room there is a frieze of carved wooden oak monkeys around the dad rail. And one of those monkeys has real ivory teeth and a little nut in its mouth. The Buttes actually summoned their servants to the dining room by shoving this nut down the monkey's throat. That operated pneumatic bell pull system. I mean, who doesn't love monkeys? Who doesn't love duck billed platypi? Is that the plural? It must be, mustn't it? Who doesn't love duckbill platypi? Cardiff also taps in, I think, to a strong trend in that late 19th, early 20th century period of an almost obsessive interest in Arthurian legend, you know, in that kind of chivalric knights in armor fantasy world. Certainly Cardiff does that, as does Casteth Koch, which was the Marquis of Bute's summer retreat, if you like, in the hills beyond Cardiff, which was also rebuilt for him by William Burgess. And it's just as crazy. But that notion of the chivalric ideal of Sir Gawain, of the search for the Holy Grail, is a really powerful one in British culture. I think the late 19th, early 20th century. And in a way it's a development of the Gothic revival from the late 18th and 19th century. You know, it's a more nuanced and more colorful narrative approach to the Middle Ages. Want to shop Walmart? Black Friday deals first. Walmart plus members get early access to our hottest deals. Join now and get 50% off a one year annual membership. Shop Black Friday deals first with Walmart plus see terms@walmartplus.com There is, though, Adrian.
- [13:37]
Jack Bateman
A bit of a contradiction, isn't there? Because this is the late 19th century, the early 20th century. How do you go about installing electric lighting and all the latest mod cons in your mock medieval castle?
- [13:49]
Adrian Tinniswood
It's not easy. It's not easy at all. I mean, it depends who you are. It depends what kind of house you've got. You know, the Marcus of Salisbury at Hatfield, who is a notorious early adopter. You know, he's got telephone Systems in the 1870s. I think he installs electricity in Hatfield in 1880, 1881. And all he did was kind of string lots of wires around and put bulbs on the end of them and they would pop every now and then, you know, occasionally they would burst into flames. There's one famous account of after dinner, everybody sort of decamps to the gallery at. I think it's the gallery at Hatfield where they notice the ceiling is on fire because one of the wires start to fuse. So the younger members of the house party just chuck cushions at the ceiling until the fire goes out. So, yeah, it is quite difficult. We start to see electric light round about 1880. Craigside is often said to be one of the first houses lit by electric light. I think that's debatable, but it's also. It's certainly one of the first houses to be lit by electric light, powered by a purpose built hydroelectric plant there. That's the official line out the way. Hatfield is also lit by electric light of the early 1880s. We start to see telephone systems and even telephone exchanges being installed in country houses. Not usually with a link to the outside world, but they're telephone exchanges that operate within the house, you know, as a more sophisticated equivalent to the. Or development on the bellpool system. We see water being pumped up, we see the, you know, the introduction of bathrooms. But again, some country house owners filled their homes with bathrooms. Others thought that 25 bedrooms, two bathrooms are fine. You know, different people have different priorities. And of course it costs this kind of thing. It costs quite a lot.
- [15:39]
Jack Bateman
And talking about the sort of features you might expect to find in a country house, then you also have lots of chapels being built. And I wondered to what extent being seen to be a man of faith was important for a wannabe country gentleman.
- [15:55]
Adrian Tinniswood
Being seen to be is still very important, I think, for a number of reasons. One, it taps into that notion of the man in the big house or the couple in the big house being the leaders of their community. So you go to church On a Sunday, you sit in the family pew at the front, the head of the household may read the lesson. And that's not just because you're devout, although some of them were. It's because you had to be seen by the rest of the community. You had to be seen to be doing the right thing. And one of the right thing was going to church on a Sunday. Now, some country houses, some country house owners took it rather further than that. I mean, it was still quite common by the turn of the century to have morning prayers. You might have those morning prayers in a purpose built chapel, if you've got one in the house. More commonly, you probably had those prayers in the great hall. You know, there was perhaps a hymn, there was a couple of prayers, there was a reading and that was it. And that will be for the whole family and for their servants. For other more pious country house owners. Yes, you've got a chapel, dedicated chapel with a clergyman, you know, who's maybe your secretary and is also works as, operates as a chaplain and you will have services in the chapel that's actually dying out quite a lot. Although the chapels are still there, you know, and you do still see chapels being built. Very important chapels being built. In the later 19th century, Eton hall, the Dukes of Westminster have this fabulous Gothic chapel by Waterhouse, if I remember right, which still survives today even though the rest of Eton hall has been knocked about a bit. The Duke of Newcastle at Clumber had the most wonderful chapel built. It's more like a miniature cathedral. You know, it's a huge church built, freestanding, built in the grounds and it survived when Clumber park, his house, did not. But the Duke of Newcastle was a devout Anglo Catholic and you know, for him the ritual, the incense, the candles burning on the altar, all the things which evangelical Protestants in the late 19th century thought were the work of the devil, were absolutely essential to his notion of worship. You do get kind of battles in the 1880s and 1890s between the Protestant wing of the Church of England and the Catholic wing of the Church of England.
- [18:18]
Jack Bateman
Now, Adrian, I want to talk a bit more about the function of the country house in society and how it's perceived. Would people from outside the house, other than perhaps the staff, ever be allowed to visit the grounds? Or is it very much a closed shop?
- [18:33]
Adrian Tinniswood
There is a strong strand of philanthropy and kind of noblesse oblige to the late Victorian Edwardian country house. So some country house owners would open their house to the public on, you know, a couple of days a year or Something like that. Much more common was opening your grounds to the public, either for political rallies or for the orphanage's annual Sunday outing. A corner of the park. Or they might just open the park to the public. The Hoare family at Stourhead in Wiltshire opened Stourhead Gardens until, I think, 1913. They decided they had to close them because there was so much vandalism and sprawling of graffiti in the temples that they had shut them down. But until the gardens at Stourhead had been open since the 1770s, 1780s, they were an amenity. The park was an amenity, the country house park. So yes, they were available to the wider community. That said, it was strictly controlled. I think it does vary a lot. Sometimes there'd be sort of public footpaths going through the middle you park. At other times they will be closely guarded and they will be shut off, except when the owner allowed them to be used for a fete, for a garden party, for a charitable event.
- [19:58]
Jack Bateman
So, yes, it is quite strictly controlled. Then there is, of course, another set of people in the country house who aren't part of the family, the domestic servants and the other staff. Is the Downton Abbey image we have of the country house in terms of that upstairs, downstairs relationship, really true?
- [20:19]
Adrian Tinniswood
Yeah. I mean, I think the later 19th century is that period when you have, as contemporaries say, you have two communities. You have a kind of a social apartheid. You have a green bays door and two communities existing side by side. Already by the 1880s and 90s, you've got people kicking against that, saying, no wonder servants don't stay when they're regarded as social inferiors, when they're kept in the basement, if you like, and they sleep in the attics. Or of course, more likely with a new late Victorian house, they have a wing of their own completely. You have a servant's wing which is separated from the main house by a green baize door. And that's for soundproofing purposes. And the kitchens, the work rooms, the bedrooms of the servants are all in a separate, self contained part of the house. So that split, that apartheid, is certainly really, really at its peak round about 1900. Whether the servants have the same kind of attitude towards their master and mistress that the servants do towards the Earl and Countess of Grantham in Downton is very difficult to say. You know, there's some show fierce loyalty. A lot of servants, though, they don't stay with one family for very long. I recall years ago seeing some work on female servants and of course, most servants are female by this point. By far the biggest majority of indoor domestic servants are women. They're cheaper, apart from anything else. But I remember seeing some research which suggested that the average length of stay for a female servant in one household was two years. You moved on, or typically, you didn't just move on, you got married. You know, service. Although it's one of the biggest occupational groups, I think by 1900, there's something like 1.3 million women in domestic service. Indoor domestic service. It's the biggest occupational group, or one of the biggest occupational groups in the country, but it's a temporary one. You go into Service when you're 14, your average age of marriage, and I'm sort of blurring this, but your average age of marriage is probably about 25, 26. So you're actually only in service for 12 years, and for most of those 12 years, you're probably looking for a better job. You come out of service when you marry, because in 1900, it is still very rare to see married servants. And the married servants you do see often don't live together. They might marry, but they might be in separate households, they might be with different families.
- [22:58]
Jack Bateman
And we've talked about Downton. We can't really talk about the country house in popular culture without referring to detective fiction, the works of Agatha Christie, where it seems like country houses are just full of people being murdered. Do those stories have any basis in reality? Were there any real scandals that inspired the likes of Christie?
- [23:20]
Adrian Tinniswood
I know exactly what you mean, John. Whenever the country house owner has a collection of exotic weapons hanging on the wall, you know that one of them is going to end up in someone's back before the weekend house party's over. Don't. And, yeah, I mean, you look at the literature, you look at crime reports and country houses are being burgled, it seems like every weekend, just about. Usually, I should say. Usually the first people to be suspected are the servants. And it does seem that servants were quite handy at collaborating, conspiring, if you like, with outside burglars or just nicking stuff. Some of them weren't that bright. They would nick stuff and hide it in their room so that it was found. Others were quite sophisticated. One young man stole the family jewels and the husband got a letter from London saying that if he wanted them back, you're going to have to pay a huge ransom. And this young footman was actually sending letters to his mum in London and asking her to send them back to the house. Unfortunately, the letters he wrote were on a very distinctive. He nicked the note paper from his master's study and used his master's pen, which was a very distinctive magenta ink. So when he was apprehended, obviously he'd been reading too many penny dreadfuls because he said to the policeman, I have played the game and I have lost, you know, like some sort of villain in popular fiction. But, yes, there's lots and lots of crime going on in country houses. The police would divide burglars into dinner burglars and first sleep burglars. The dinner burglars were the ones who waited till the family were all at dinner and then put a ladder up to the bedroom window, broke in and nicked the jewels. The first sleep burglars were the ones who waited till everybody had just gone to bed. Because the idea was that your first sleep was your deepest sleep. And they would then come in, break a window and steal the silver. There were all kinds of precautions which were advised. For example, the most obvious one was to store your valuables off site. Jewelry might be kept in a safety deposit box at the bank, or at least in a fireproof burglar proof safe in the house. Internal doors should be locked at night. Windows should be shuttered and barred. Plate glass was preferable because it made more of a noise when it was broken. So as a security measure, people were urged to have plate glass windows. You could install massive iron shutters over the windows. But it was important to maintain a sense of proportion, you know, after all, one writer said, one lives in a house, not in a prison, unless one is a burglar suffering under misfortune. The best thing to do, rather than have shutters, was to hang burglar bells on the ordinary wooden shutters of windows. These burglar bells were fitted with, or alarm strings were wires fitted to bells which would jingle if the window opened or if the shutters opened. Having a telephone that was connected to the local village, if it went that far, was a good idea. Keeping a dog or two on the premises was a good idea. But letting the hound of the Baskervilles roam loose in the grounds had its own drawbacks. One writer said, the dog with a penchant for human throats is likely to get you into more trouble than the burglaries he will prevent. It was better to keep a yapping terrier actually in the house and tie the creature up at night so that thieves couldn't tempt it to the door and give it drugged food through a keyhole. Cause that was another favorite trick in fiction. If not, in fact, I'm not sure how often that really happened.
- [26:58]
Jack Bateman
Excellent. And I was really intrigued also, Adrian, about the section in your book on ghost stories. Because there is another trope, isn't there? And that's of the headless Phantom or the Grey lady wandering about the corridors. Was having a ghost, so to speak, a real asset for the country house owner?
- [27:18]
Adrian Tinniswood
It could be, certainly. And you're right. You're so right, John, that the culture of the country house around the turn of the century is just full of ghost stories. It's full of ghost stories. Anne Boleyn was seen at Blickling and also at Hever with and without her head. There are kind of horsemen, you know. Francis Drake was seen driving around Buckland Abbey in Devon, where there are so many of them. One of my favorites, I mean, I have two favorite ghost stories out of dozens that I came across. One concerns Burton Agnes hall, where apparently three sisters lived. And the younger one said that if she died, she wanted to have her head kept on a table in the hall, in the great hall, which is a kind of a curious request. Anyway, she died and the other two sisters ignored her request. But the next night this apparition appeared of the dead sister carrying her head. And when they woke in the morning, the head was there on a table in the hall. And this must have been quite a shock to them. You don't get over that kind of thing very easily. Anyway, they had her exhumed, found out that she was headless, put the head back in the coffin, and the next night it was there in the hall again. Visitors must have found this quite trying, I should imagine eventually. And the storyteller is a little bit vague on this, but eventually the head stopped turning up. I'm not quite sure what they did. Whether they, you know, flushed it down the laboratory or something, I do not know, but. But it stopped appearing on the table in the great hall every. Every morning. The other story, though, is a fabulous one about a chap who bought Come the place, which was on the site of Amy Robsart's house, the house where Amy Robsart is said to have met her end in the 16th century, having been thrown down the stairs. And the idea was that although there's a different house, that perhaps her ghost still walked. And this fellow called Scott in the 1890s, he paid 2,000 odd pounds for Come the place and then discovered that it wasn't the right house. And he took the owner to court, complaining that there was no ghost and lost. And it's the only case I've Ever come across of somebody being sued for not having a haunted house? He said that it would greatly enhance its value. I'm not sure it would. If I would, I don't fancy the idea myself.
- [29:51]
Jack Bateman
Quite a surreal legal case then. I can't really think of any other precedents or anything that's happened since. To conclude, Adrian, the subtitle of this book is the Country House before the Great War. I know that you've chosen to end the book in 1914 partly because this is a prequel to two books that you've written covering post World War I, but is it also because you feel that the Great War marks a sea change in any way?
- [30:19]
Adrian Tinniswood
When I started work on this, John, I was, you know, I was convinced of that idea that it all came to an end with the first War. Although in fact, once you reflect, you're quite right. I wrote a book called the Long weekend about the 1920s and 30s country house. And I knew, although I sort of ignored the fact when I was doing the work, but I knew that the country house went on in the 20s and 30s, as indeed it did in the 40s and 50s, and it does today. But there's no doubt that the First World War does mark a watershed. It marks a pause. Before the First World War, there is this brio, there is this joy in country house life, there is this excitement, this prosperity, this confidence. And after the war, the first war that wobbles. It doesn't disappear entirely, but it certainly much less prominent. People still live in country houses after the first War. They still build country houses. They still live that country house life. They still go to church on Sunday and read the lesson, you know, every Sunday morning. They still have house parties, they still shoot. They do all the things that people did before the first war, but some of the joy's gone out of it somewhere. Something's lost. And it's hard to pin down exactly what it is. I guess it's confidence in lots of ways. It's a confidence in the future. One of the houses that fascinates me has always fascinated me is Castle Drogo in Devon, which is Sir Edwin Lutyen's granite battlemented masterpiece of a 20th century take on a castle. It was built for Sir Julius Drew, a grocer, though he founded the Home Colonial Stores, and it was begun in 1910. It was begun because Julius Drew was convinced that his family were descended from a Norman knight called Drogo who settled in Dru stainton after the Conquest. And Drew was looking for roots. He was looking for Respectability. He was looking for validity. He was looking for a pedigree. So he asks Lutyens to build him a castle. And Lutyens says, I do wish he didn't want a castle, just a big old house. But he asked Lutyens to build him a castle. The work begins in 1910. It stops in 1914 and doesn't resume till after the war. And the Drews live in their old country house down in Sussex, a place called Wadhurst Hall. Now the Dru's son, Adrian Drew is killed in the first war and the family do what a lot of families did. They leave his bedroom as a kind of a shrine, a memorial. They put all his school photographs, his cricket bats, his tennis rackets, his straw boater from when he was a teen. They put all these things in that room and they keep it as a remembrance, a memorial to their dead son in Wadhurst. What intrigues me is that after the war, Lutyens resumes building Drogo and eventually in 1928, I think the family is allowed to move into their new house to Castle Drogo. They take that entire memorial room with them from Wadhurst and they reconstruct this shrine. They reconstruct this shrine in their brand new house. It's like even though Drogo is new as a faith in the future, it's a symbol of the post war country house. In spite of that, they can't leave their ghost behind. The house is still haunted by a past that doesn't belong to it. An unutterably poignant notion, I think.
- [33:56]
Jack Bateman
A very powerful and lasting memorial. Adrien, you've talked about Castle Drogo there and earlier you were very enthusiastic when talking about Cardiff Castle. Are there any other country houses that listeners should really go and visit if they want to understand this period in history?
- [34:14]
Adrian Tinniswood
Dozens and dozens and dozens of country houses. The thing is, you've got country houses that were built in the period of those Drogo and Cragside, I would say William Armstrong's Cragside in Northumberland are the two finest examples, I guess. But there are a dozen more I could name for you, John. But let's also remember that country houses that are much, much older are still being used. You know, the Devonshires, as I said right at the beginning of our talk, the Devonshire's are still living in Chatsworth, which is built in the 17th century. The dukes of Marlborough are still living at Blenheim palace, which is built in the early 18th century. So it's not just houses that were built in this period. I think the key to understanding the period is how houses were used, not just brand new houses, but the old established houses, and how, you know, how they continued to be used both before and indeed after the first war.
- [35:12]
John Baulkham
That was historian Adrian Tinniswood. Adrian's new book, the Power and the the Country House before the Great War, is out now, published by Vintage. And while we might think of English country houses as idyllic locations for an afternoon out, Stephanie Barchowski joined us for another episode of the History Extra podcast to reveal how many have a more turbulent and violent history than we might expect. You can find the link to that episode in the description of this one. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Jack Bateman.