Audiences who have watched the British drama "Downton Abbey" will often be fascinated by the scenery of British country houses. Before the world was brought into a truly modern society by the First World War, the British aristocracy often owned several of these country houses or estates, far from the rapidly changing world, preserving the legacy of old Britain: traditional architecture, grand balls, thoughtful and cumbersome etiquette. The nobles who lived in the villa were elegant and relaxed, and life was like a long weekend.
The arrival of war shattered this tranquility. Social history researchers generally believe that the period from World War I to World War II was a period of decline in traditional English country houses, many nobles died on the battlefield, and the buildings in the manor were requisitioned as war facilities. However, the British social historian Adrian Tennesswood tells us that in the fracture of tradition, there is also a tenacious continuity. Although it was the sunset of the old days in Britain, the nobles still tried to maintain the rhythm of their lives, guarding the dignity of traditional culture before the shadow of war, even if this effort was tantamount to a praying arm compared to the trend of history.
During World War I, an old woman reproached the philosopher Russell: Men have gone to the battlefield to fight for the protection of the country's civilization, why do you retreat here? Russell replied, "Because I am the civilization they want to protect." Wars have results, but they always come at a cost. These country houses have eventually become victims of war, but perhaps when we look back and count the aristocratic spirit and humanistic customs carried in these manors, we may also think that what we sacrificed may be exactly what we hope to protect in the war. The following is an excerpt from The Long Weekend: Life in a Country House in England, with the permission of the publisher, with deletions and subtitles added by the editor.
Author: Adrian Tennesswood
Edition: China Workers Publishing House, 2021.4
The Manor Ball: Decency in War and Old Days
On June 16, 1939, a notice was published in the Times' letter column. The author is Lord Derwent, Chairman of the George Group. Thanks to the kindness of the Earl of Jersey, he wrote, The George group planned to host the organization's first annual ball at Osterley Manor in Middlesex. This will be a Georgian-style themed gardening convention that is sure to be the event of this year's hunting season. Osterley Manor has been in the news in recent weeks as a result of the Earl of Jersey's decision to open the family-owned Adam-designed mansion to the public 3 days a week.
Admission to the surrounding gardens is 6 pence per person, while a visit to the main villa is available at an additional charge of 1 shilling. Asked why he did it, Jersey said: "I don't live in it and a lot of people are eager to see it, and that's enough." ”
They do crave it. In the first month after opening, 120,000 guests visited, and newspapers were full of praise for the owner and his villa. Contemporary British Artists – From Augustus John to Duncan Grant, Charles M. Kundal - the exhibition of works, but also to add luster to the villa. "Lately, most of the big country houses that used to surround London have either been emptied, demolished, or turned into institutions." The Times reported, "It would be a great thing to get the public to see Middlesex's country house, not only in its own splendor, but also in the natural surroundings around it."
The Garden Fair is a more exclusive thing, an event that raises funds, where participants pay 25 shillings each and receive "buffets, beers and wine glasses", the income of which will go to the George Group for the preservation of ancient buildings of the 18th century. Guests are invited to dress up. Movie star Countess Jersey (from Hollywood, Virginia M.) Cheriel) wears a mesh dress tailored for her by Oliver Messer, pale blue, purple and rose, which shines throughout her body. Messer took over most of the organizational work and decorated the ball with a huge lakeside pavilion. She wore a crown-shaped diamond headdress on her dusty gray hair and a diamond bracelet around her wrist, but when the sun rose, she lost the £250 bracelet. "It was a dramatic climactic moment." One social columnist wrote, "In this remarkable hunting season, at almost every banquet, there have been mysterious 'disappearances' of jewelry and furs. "Oliver Messer's sister, countess of Ross, wears aquamarine around her neck and has dyed blue hair combed high like Madame de Pompadour. Diana Cooper wears a Wimpal headscarf. Actor-director Peter Glenwell completely left the 18th-century theme behind to play Prince Paris of Troy, who wore another costume that Messer had designed for Offenbach's Beautiful Helen 7 years earlier. Cecil Beaton wore a brocade coat, while Northern Ireland's Protestant Lord Antrim chose the cardinal's scarlet robe. The minions stood on the steps of the porch and greeted about 1,000 guests, all wearing puff wigs and antique uniforms. Fireworks rise from the lake and are bluish-purple by the floodlights at night. Presented to the guests is a beer garden steeped in 18th-century style; and an open-air wrestling show.
An orchestra dressed as an 18th-century peasant played brisk little steps, but "the guests did not dance to the music, but listened with a religious solemn look", until they retreated into the gazebo of Messer and danced to the accompaniment of a modern swing band until dawn. On that very day, the government distributed 15 million leaflets to families across the country, Your Gas Mask: How to Save and Use It.
That summer, as the world was faltering toward war, Britain's luxurious mansions remained calm and moved on. In Cliveden, Nancy M. Astor presides over the annual gatherings of the local chapter of the All England Women's Total Abstinence Alliance. According to local media reports, the tea party was arranged to "make everyone happy." The guest of honour of the annual garden feast at Blenheim Palace was the honourable guest of honour by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, John F. Kennedy. Sir Simon. War may never come, he told the crowd of onlookers. The British people, with a strong heart and a cool head, will "get this thing done" well.
Ginny Courtaud entertained members of the Anglo-French Arts and Tourism Association at Eltham Palace, while 4 huge anti-air balloons hung above the visitors' heads. At Harwood Manor, the princess's two teenage sons were subjected
The War Department condemned it because the harwood news, a one-page tabloid written on a typewriter during the school holidays, described the details of the anti-aircraft artillery in too much detail.
300 guests danced in the ballroom of Castle Howard to celebrate the death of Mark Thompson. As a grown-up, Howard "rubbed shoulders with titled nobles". Seventy-five years later, Mark Howard, who was already a major in the Cold Creek Guards, was killed in the Battle of Normandy, and a few months later, his bomber pilot brother was also killed in a daytime raid on the Rhine.
At Chatsworth Estate, the Duke of Devonshire hosted a garden party attended by 2,800 people to celebrate the coming of age of his son and heir Billy Cavendish, and several circuses were invited to perform for the crowd. As night fell, Chatsworth was illuminated by floodlights and hundreds of cars were parked in the driveway overlooking the estate just to catch a glimpse of the spectacle. In 1944, Billy M. Cavendish was killed by enemy snipers on the Belgian front.
On that hot and humid August, the Duke and Duchess of Portland, in their 80s, held a celebration at Welbeck Manor to celebrate their golden wedding. The celebration was attended by 800 of the Duke's manor workers, dressed in costumes, recreating scenes from the manor's past. Robin Hood and his retinue appeared, followed by two kings— Charles I, who visited the manor in 1633, and William of Orange, who visited in 1695. The actors perform a ballet and a carefully choreographed opening overture in which local women play the three goddesses of destiny who are weaving the web of life, while students from surrounding villages play part of the spinning of the web. The Archbishop of Canterbury also came to see it in person. That summer, country houses were in the news for other reasons. In the event of an emergency, the school will occupy the vacant mansions, and people are already making preparations to go to the villa's land to set up tents for the evacuees. If the worst happens, large companies will buy country houses as employees' homes outside of London.
Stills from Downton Abbey
Milton Hill House in Oxfordshire, turned into Esso House; Chesterton Cottage, an Italian-style mansion just outside Bicester, was acquired by the Royal Deal Insurance Company; and The Alsford Estate, located near Winchester, in the early Georgian style, was also sold to the Providence Mutual Insurance Company for use as the headquarters at the time of the war.
Some criticised villa owners like the Jersey couple, seeing that Europe was on the brink of the end of the world, and were still busy playing make-up games. They are very sensitive to this voice, and Country Life magazine intends to protect the gardening convention of Osterley Manor, implying that it is precisely such an event that we are going to be called to defend, "because on the night of July, there is a great country house ball, in a sense, the beautiful flowers of civilization in some way."
At the same time, however, the magazine also began advertising recommendations on "fire prevention in village mansions" to prevent air raids. The government has also begun to explain everything possible, from ways to darken windows to procedures for evacuating children, pregnant women, and "transportable adult blind people." Incendiary bombs are considered one of the main threats to country houses, and owners are urged to clean up the garbage in the attic and roof spaces, where the fire most likely starts, and to ensure that the top floor is stored with firefighting equipment – several buckets of water and sand, a hand pump, a bathtub or water tank filled with water to replenish the buckets when they run out of water. If you pour a bucket of water into a ignited incendiary bomb, it will explode, bursting incendiary debris in all directions. You should suffocate it with sand or dry soil. ”
The Ministry of Aviation announced a plan to convert part of the land on the Stolhead Estate into an airport, but after that, the plan was abandoned. Enterprising companies have launched new products - concrete bomb shelters with fences on the façade, which are circular and have domes on them, which are said to be likely to be mistaken for garden shrines in the countryside. In fact, this makes them look more like public facilities.
On Sunday, September 3, the war began in the morning. In the afternoon, Harold Nicholson, then a member of Parliament, drove from Westminster to Sissinghurst Castle, passing a convoy of trucks laden with evacuees from London's East End. He was startled when an old woman in one of the trucks, waving her fist at the car he was driving by, shouted that "war is all the fault of the rich." It was a day full of omens, and after arriving in Sissinghurst, he found that the flag of Sackville, flying at the top of the tower, had been removed.
At 11:15 that morning, almost before Neville Chamberlain's famous national radio ended —"What we're going to fight is evil: barbaric violence, injustice, oppression, persecution, and I believe justice will triumph over them"—the country house has come in new use. By the end of the month, Blenheim Palace and Attingham Manor, The Bowwood House of the Marquis of Lansdowne and Lord Mersham Palace of Lord Meturn were all used as boarding schools. Earl Harwood also offered Harwood House for hospital use. Many of the owners of large villas have taken similar measures. Although there were no prisoners of war yet, Donington House in Leicestershire had been established as a prisoner-of-war camp.
The Earl of Pembroke took in 40 young refugees evacuated from kindergarten at Wilton House, and Cecil Beaton of Ashcombe came to take pictures of them, and they huddled together on a small Palladio-style bridge in the villa, smiling and confused. "The most unmanageable, flashy things in mansions are now safely requisitioned to serve wartime machines." Country Life magazine commented. "Indeed, the more rooms, ear rooms and outhouses a dwelling, the more desirable it looks."
Country house between two world wars
From the Battle of the Somme to the Second World War, how did country houses change during this period?
First of all, it changes the purpose of use. In 1944, Robert M. Luctians estimated that after the war, there would be no more ancestral villas. On the one hand, there are fluctuations in intergenerational incomes, and the massive expansion of the class that owns villas; on the other hand, the gradual dispossession of real estate by the families that hold the land", which means that this time, the old order is really at the end of its rope.
But that doesn't mean that country houses are also at the end of their ropes. As we have seen, the disintegration of traditional ties between families, mansions, communities, the disintegration of estates, the sale of villas and their ancillary items often only leads to a change in ownership and the introduction of a less traditional way of life into country houses. Still, the feeling of doom persists, and in the 1930s and early 1940s, people were looking for a future for historic buildings that were economically difficult to sustain.
In 1934, at the annual congress of the National Trusteeship Association, the Marquis of Lothian called on the association, as a private charity, to expand the scope of its protection, until then, the scope of protection was limited to rural areas and smaller historic buildings, "while another part of our national property – the country's historic dwellings – now also faces a potential threat of destruction". He told the audience that The country houses in Britain had been sentenced to death, and that the axe to destroy them was taxation. Hearing this, they cheered.
The Marquis of Lothian suggested that the National Trusteeship Association should receive a batch of well-furnished, historic mansions. (The Society currently owns two such mansions, The Montachot House and Barrington House, both in Somerset; however, the Society has no idea what to do with them.) He also urged the authorities to exempt historic buildings from inheritance tax unless they are sold; the Treasury Department should approve all grant requests for maintenance and restoration; even if a country house is sold, it can be exempted from inheritance tax, as long as the house itself, the garden and the contents are preserved as a whole, and at the same time be prepared to welcome public visits from time to time.
The words of the Marquis of Lothian resonated. Three months later, at the national meeting of the English Village Conservation Council, the pioneering urban planner William W. Bush was appointed to the site. Harding S. Thompson called for the formation of a villa owners' association to lobby authorities to "reduce the liability of owners in the event of a clearance in exchange for access by the regulated public for a specific period of time." Lord Zetland, president of the National Trusteeship Association, proposed that, in return for the owners opening the villa to visitors, "the government should be asked to reduce part of the taxes they now bear, thus making the maintenance and upkeep of the villas much easier".
But the government did not intend to give these concessions to the owners of country houses, especially during the Great Depression; however, the idea of using public funds for the public good ultimately affected all British state enterprises. At the same time, the National Trusteeship Association lobbied parliament to pass a new law allowing the owners of historic buildings to hand them over to the Trusteeship Association and then stay and continue to live there – something prohibited by the Charity Act. In the summer of 1937, the National Trusteeship Act was passed by a vote in Parliament and became law, and the National Trusteeship Association thus opened the curtain on the country house program.
According to The Observer, the essence of the plan is that the owners are able to transfer ownership of approved country houses to the National Trusteeship Association, while retaining rights for themselves, their families and heirs to continue to live as long as they wish. In this way, the places handed over will be preserved permanently, not as dusty museums, but as inhabited houses, and their rooms, objects, have been used for centuries by families associated with them.
Celebrities have pitched the program. "There is no other choice." Vida Sackville-West said. Thirty years later, the romantic Tower of Ruins she built in Sissinghurst was also handed over to the National Trusteeship Association. The owners may feel, "They can't bear to do this, but if the cost of repairs alone is already high, what else can they do?" The Marquis of Lothian's 1934 speech opened the way for all this, and when he died in 1940, he left Blickling House to the National Trusteeship. In 1942, Sir Charles Trevillian handed over Warrington House, and in the same year, the Astors also gave Cliveden and a large donation to the National Trusteeship Association. As early as the First World War, Sir Henry and Alda Mrs. Hall (whose son Harry was tragically killed in Palestine) had begun negotiations on the Stohead Estate, and in 1946 the villa and its grounds were finally vested in the National Trusteeship Association.
A year later, on the same day, both Sir Henry and Lady Alda died. Country houses have never been investigated nationwide, but historic preservationists at the time argued that 57 "large mansions" and 550 to 600 smaller country houses "are worth preserving because of their historical significance, architectural purpose, or natural beauty." No matter how one defines "worthy", this number is vastly underestimated. In any case, even if the pre-World War II trickle into the National Trusteeship's mansions became floods after 1945, the country house program covered only a fraction of them. By the early 1950s, the Trusteeship Association had opened a total of 98 villas and their gardens to the public. The remaining thousands of villas remain privately owned.
By the 1940s, many country house owners were living as they had in the past few decades. They either stay where they are or sell their ancestral property. Some continue to make ends meet by discarding another "remote land," some rare books, or portraits of ancestors; others replace families who have left, buying their own past and taking their place in the county's social community. They installed generators and purchased labor-saving equipment to help them solve the shortage of servants. They complain about taxes, they curse the government, but they take in the evacuees, send their sons to the front lines, and sacrifice for the country.
When war broke out, astute homeowners quickly donated their mansions. They felt that they could choose their tenants, after all, giving themselves some degree of control: it was better to use the house as a girls' boarding school than as a military barracks. They were right: it is estimated that in the 10 years after 1945, more than 1,000 country houses had to be demolished as a direct result of wartime ruin. Statues in the classical gardens were shattered by soldiers who didn't care at all about what Lothian called a "national treasure." Rococo paneling was stained, baroque staircases were smashed and used as firewood. When Philip Sassoon died in 1939, he left Port Limney to his cousin Hannah Sasson. Al Qube, at that time the villa was requisitioned as a residence for the British and foreign air forces, but was immediately completely destroyed.
The Taname Villa in Dorset was requisitioned by the Ministry of Defence for shooting training and has never been returned to its owner ever since. The forecourt of Lothar Castle is covered with concrete pillboxes, and it was here that Lolia Ponson listened with relish to the story of the Arctic expedition of the "Yellow Earl"; its exquisite gardens were obliterated under the weeds, "the paths and seats of yesteryear left only vague outlines, pagodas or pavilions scattered everywhere, they are sad relics of the romantic times of the past".
To make matters worse, many country houses were abandoned for 6 years, so much so that at the end of World War II and when the Ministry of Defence began to return requisitioned mansions, leaking pipes, drooping roofs, and decaying walls abounded, and they achieved the damage that Hitler's bombers dreamed of. Many homeowners never live in their house again.
Their fate is all the more ironic, and throughout the war, the government exploited country houses to make them the epitome of British values, their ancient, romantic, ivy-crawling imagery in stark contrast to the cold, mechanized inhumane atrocities of the enemy. These values have been reflected in dozens of wartime films, from "The House of Loyalty" to "The Disturbance Caused by the Birds." They portray Britain – or rather England, a serene, Cotswold England – as a typical rural idyll, where individualism rises to eccentric levels, where humanity shines, where the attachment of people to the years gone by, is beyond anything.
Country houses, either with moats and wooden structures, or solemn and magnificent, are precisely this unique symbol of Britishness that symbolizes what the historian Trevillian celebrated in 1945 as "the beauty of England's countryside and agricultural life, nature and history". It is precious, as if it represents a common cause. A war widow told Christopher Hirssy that her husband had gone to fight in North Africa, and before he died, he had found a copy of Country Life and wrote to her, "It's so pleasant to read about what a man is fighting for."
"The long weekend is over"
Sir George Vernon of Hambury House was the last in this long line of squires. His ancestor, Richard M. Before the arrival of the Spanish Armada, Vernon was a parish priest in Hambury, Worcestershire. By the time of Queen Anne's reign, court litigator Thomas W. Bush was a court lawyer. Vernon funded the construction of The Hambury House, and the completion of the mansion marked the success of his own business. The House of Hambury is made of red brick with daylight skylights and white window frames, and the interior is decorated with frescoes painted by the court painter Sir James Thornhill. By the Victorian era, the Vernon family had expanded their estates on these lands.
By the 1920s, Sir George owned and personally managed 5,000 acres of excellent Worcestershire farmland. He belonged to his class, to his time. He was a magistrate for 35 years and resigned because he thought colleagues were too lenient with speeding drivers. He was one of the leaders of the National Farmers' Union and, like the owners of many country houses, he did his part to open the gardens of Hanbury Manor to the public once a year with funding from the Queen's Regional School of Nursing. He sent several angry letters to the newspapers complaining about the punitive effects of taxes on peasants, that when the times were bad, he protected his tenants, and from time to time in order to make ends meet, he also occasionally turned over sporadic jewelry and silver tableware for household use, or some books and manuscripts from the Library of Hambury House, and secretly sold them.
In many ways, George W. Bush Sir Vernon was the typical English squire: grumpy, always complaining that the country would not be a country, and he had to try to keep his ancestral home, to keep his place on the branches of the crumbling genealogy tree, which was deeply rooted in the community and in the land of the county, and had lasted for hundreds of years. In other respects, Sir George is less typical.
In 1905, at the age of forty, he married Doris Allen, a 22-year-old daughter of his neighbor. But their marriage didn't work out. They had no children, and by the 1920s, Doris had moved out of Hambury House and into the city mansion the couple had bought in Chelsea. Sir George was left alone, alone with his Queen Anne-style mansion.
One day in 1928, he walked into the property manager Edward M. Villa Porvik, announced that he wanted to second his daughter for 6 months. "The hall is a mess." He told Povik. So, 16-year-old Ruth Bovik became the baron's secretary and lived with him. She never left. Ten years later, Sir George amended his will to include Ruth as the beneficiary, and Ruth changed her name to Vernon. In front of those who don't know their true relationship, Ruth will pretend to be George's daughter.
In the mid-1930s, Sir George led a campaign against tithes, which opposed the fact that the church could legally impose tithes on many peasants, and that the money collected had nothing to do with the interests of the peasants. He slammed the Church of England in the newspapers and on the podium, declaring to the audience that he refused to be buried in this holy land: "I will not let any weeping priest recite any prayer at my funeral." Like landlords and farmers elsewhere in the country, he refused to pay tithes.
In June 1935, in front of hundreds of supporters, he stood on the steps of Hambury House to prevent the bailiffs from forcibly seizing the house's furniture. He then addressed the crowd, telling them, "We in the United Kingdom have always regarded it as our holiest duty to resist oppression and injustice from anywhere." Sir Oswald Mosley and the British Fascist League also supported a campaign against tithes, and their blackshirts were disrupting auctions, setting up barricades on farms to boycott the bailiffs and police. This allowed from the Baron to establish contact with Mosley. When Mosley wanted to nominate a local as a fascist party candidate against Stanley Baldwin in the Worcestershire constituency, Sir George endorsed the plan and told Mosley that he would use his influence to help the movement. He never joined the British Fascist League, but he had anything to do with fascism, which fit well with his own highly independent right-wing political style.
Then, war broke out. In the last week of May 1940, Mosley and hundreds of other fascist sympathizers were rounded up and imprisoned under Defense Regulation 18B. In the days that followed, Sir George became concerned that his pre-war connection with the fascists, though not substantive, might be enough to bring detectives from the Political Security Service to Hambury House. He was also depressed by a heart attack and decided that his life was imminent.
At noon on 14 June 1940, Ruth heard a gunshot coming from a small room in front of Sir George's bedroom. She rushed in and found that her husband was dead, and the revolver was right next to the corpse, and there was a letter that said, "My heart is getting worse and worse at night, and it makes me miserable, so I decided not to endure this pain for another two or three weeks, and I took shortcuts."
In June of that year, there were other things that were catching the public's attention. The demoralized remnants of the British Expeditionary Force had just been withdrawn from Dunkirk. Both Paris and Norway had fallen into German hands. Chamberlain was gone, and Churchill stood in his seat in defiance and delivered a speech to the House of Commons: "We will never surrender." In this context, the suicide of a 74-year-old baron did not attract much attention from the press.
But death can lead to a different kind of ending. There is no longer a place in this world, for a colonel-like squire like Sir George Vernon. With the outbreak of this new war, the old order, who had long confidently predicted its end, would truly die quietly and without objection.
At Sir George's funeral, there were no crying priests standing by. On 22 June, his coffin, covered with a British rice flag, was transported from Hambury house and placed behind a farm truck. A makeshift funeral procession drove to a nearby glade in the woods, where an old pavilion once stood, and he was buried there without any ceremony.
Ruth was the only mourner. Whether she knew it or not, she mourned more than just a lover, nor just a grumpy squire. She mourns the past, a way of life, a lost Britain. The long weekend was over.
The original author | Adrian Tennesswood
Excerpts | Liu Yaguang
Edit | Liu Yaguang
Proofreading | Liu Jun
Source: Beijing News