By 1914, the future of many once grand country houses was already in doubt – then came the upheaval of the First World War. Jeremy Musson looks at how the conflict hastened their decline
Why did Britain have so many country mansions before the First World War?
In those days... every county had 30 or 40 big houses, [each] with a staff of 30 or 40. Who would have dreamed that in my lifetime all that would pass away. We thought it would last forever.” So writes former butler Bob Sharpe of the days of his youth as a gamekeeper’s son in Edwardian Britain.
Back then, the owners of the ‘big house’ seemed to rule the world. These lucky few possessed thousands of acres of tenanted land and employed armies of estate-workers, sometimes forming the communities of entire villages.
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If you lived in the country before 1914, you may have depended on the local landowner not only for your job, but also your home, a school for your children and basic medical treatment. But the First World War cut a dramatic swathe through all of this, changing lives at all levels of rural society.
The Victorian era had been a boom time for the big country house. As empire and industry swelled Britain’s wealth, many splendid new houses sprang up, while older houses were replaced or enlarged.
Many of these houses were lavish status symbols, designed to convey a sense of authority and power. Among the most palatial was Trentham Hall (top image)– built in the 1830s for Britain’s largest landowner, the Duke of Sutherland. It was so impressive that in 1873 the visiting Shah of Persia remarked to the future King Edward VII that their host was “too grand for a subject – you’ll have to have his head off when you come to the throne”.
Brigades of domestic servants transformed Trentham and other country houses into complex machines designed for the comfort and prestige of the owners. Such lavish lifestyles were possible thanks to a world predicated on low tax and low wages (although, for domestic staff, there were other ‘perks’ that made service reasonably attractive).
How did the First World War jeopardise the future of stately homes?
Then along came the war. Four years of bloody conflict left millions dead – and accelerated the dramatic social upheaval that saw many country houses shut up and abandoned by the 1950s.
Ironically, the First World War was in some ways a golden hour for landowners, with their long military traditions and training for leadership.
Many servants and estate staff joined up willingly, eager to “do their bit” (some encouraged by their employers, some not). One MP from Sussex, Gerald Courthorpe, joined up with 15 of his estate workers. Gamekeepers were recruited for their skills in stalking and shooting (many from the Highland estates were banded
together in the famous Lovatt Scouts).
Brodsworth Hall in Yorkshire supplied a typical cross-section: at least 10 men from among the house and estate staff enlisted in 1914; others joined up in 1915 or were conscripted in 1916.
The statistics of those who died in the war are staggering for all classes: of the six million who served, more than 720,000 died around one in eight. Estate clerk Allan Simpson was among four from Brodsworth Hall who did not come home. He died on the first day of the battle of the Somme in 1916.
Officers were killed at an even more astonishing rate: among British and Irish peers and their sons who served in the war, one in five was killed. One such was Captain “Harry” Henry Colt Arthur Hoare, of the Queen’s Own Dorset Yeomanry, who died of his wounds after the battle of Mughar Ridge on 13 November, 1917. His death was to affect the fate of one of Britain’s great estates, of which more below.
As the casualties mounted and the British Army grew in size, so the numbers serving at country houses diminished. By 1916, Brodsworth was suffering from a serious shortage of staff, due to key people such as the head gardener, head gamekeeper and butler having gone to the front.
As the Livestock Journal observed: “Like all other estate owners, the labour problem... has presented itself in acute form at Brodsworth... Quite a large number of the little army of men who find employment on the Brodsworth estate are now serving their king and country.”
It was a problem that never really went away for the great country houses, and in the interwar years, economic uncertainty, taxation and inflation all meant that landowners could no longer afford to employ these small armies of servants.
Why were so many stately homes demolished?
The First World War put an extraordinary strain on the world of the country house, but the factors that brought about the sales and demolition of houses and the break-up of so many estates, from the end of the war until the 1950s, had already gathered like storm clouds before war broke out.
Agricultural depression from the 1870s greatly reduced the value of the rents paid to landowners by their tenants (in some estates dropping by a half or two thirds).
Most significant of all was the new taxation on inherited capital in 1894 – known then as death duties – at first set at 8% on estates worth more than £1 million. These developments accounted in part for the loss of some country houses before the First World War: Trentham Hall, for instance, was partly demolished as early as 1912, though its magnificent gardens survive.
Death duties rose quickly during the war; peace then placed its own demands on the Exchequer. By 1919, death duties had reached 40% on estates worth more than £2 million – and by 1940, it was 65%. Many houses were sold or demolished simply because that reduced the value of the estate, and hence the amount payable in death duties. (Many landowners had more than one country house.) By the end of the 20th century, more than 1,000 English country houses had been demolished.
Some country houses were swept away with another social earthquake prompted by the end of the war. Between 1919 and 1921, about a quarter of the land in England and Wales changed hands – the most radical shift of land ownership since the dissolution of the monasteries.
A brief postwar land price boom after years of depression had encouraged many large landowners to sell, often to their former tenant farmers. In cases where the lands had been dispersed, there was often no need for the house any more.
The Earl of Strathmore’s Streatlam Castle estate in County Durham was sold in 1922 for £100,000. While the family retained other properties, including their estate at Glamis Castle in Scotland, the Streatlam Castle lands were divided and the house stripped.
Some landowners held on to their houses by selling off outlying lands and art. Every county has some of these reduced estates now, usually in trust and open to the public, but still lived in by the families who built them or owned them for centuries. Other properties became institutions, schools, hotels or were divided into flats.
When peace came to Brodsworth, many of its estate workers returned, but life was never quite the same again. Brodsworth’s old squire Thellusson died in 1919 and the estate began a long decline passing through each of his four childless sons and finally to his nephew, a First World War flying ace.
The latter’s widow battled along in the house with unheated rooms, leaking roofs and virtually no staff from the 1950s until her death in the 1980s. It is now preserved by English Heritage in its part- threadbare state, as a monument to the decline of the country house world in the 20th century: a decline made all the more obvious by the departure of the skilled servants required to keep it running, first to the trenches and then to other careers.
Other houses were more directly affected by war losses. The aforementioned Captain ‘Harry’ Hoare had been sole heir to Stourhead House and Gardens; with no heir apparent, his father Henry Hoare eventually gave the property to the National Trust in 1946.
Brodsworth and Stourhead are in some ways therefore memorials to all those brave young men, and to a world that changed dramatically in the mid-20th century. These changes left the great country houses, and the tightly knit rural communities that had supported and surrounded them, quite different places from the ones recalled so vividly by butler Bob Sharpe
