The Long Weekend:
Life in the English Country House, 1918-1939. By Adrian Tinniswood.
Basic; 344 pages; $30. To be published in Britain by Jonathan Cape in
June; £25.
Partying, hunting,
shooting
May 7th 2016
LOOKING back on the
years before war broke out across Europe in 1914, Vita
Sackville-West, an aristocratic English novelist, remembered an
upper-class world of “warmth and security, leisure and continuity”.
For many of her aristocratic contemporaries in the 1920s and 1930s,
the Edwardian country house was the heart of that world. For them,
the pre-war age of innocence stood in stark contrast to what
followed. In many memories, it was a period of decline and decay.
One-tenth of titled
families had lost their heirs in the trenches. Mansions and estates
were put up for sale at an unprecedented rate, which rose further
after the stockmarket crash of 1929. Some were torn down, others
abandoned: in the 12 years to 1930 more than 180 country houses were
destroyed. Wollaton Hall, one of the most flamboyant Elizabethan
examples, was transferred to the local city council and became a
museum; Claremont in Surrey became a girls’ school. As the
importance of land declined, mansions and family seats no longer had
much use as a home.
The inter-war era
has long been seen as an “Indian summer”, awaiting the death
knell of the second world war. But as Adrian Tinniswood argues in an
engaging new account of inter-war country-house life, this has
obscured a world of energy, invention and change. “Fast”, the
byword of the era, applied not just to Soho “flappers” and Jazz
Age ballrooms, but to the country-house set, too. The loosening bonds
between family, mansion and local community meant the country house
was changing, but it was not dying. New owners—often
Americans—brought “new aesthetics, new social structures, new
meanings”.
A “spirit of
restlessness” characterised the age. Country-house parties could
last from 48 hours to three weeks. The word “week-end” entered
common usage as expanding rail networks and car ownership meant that
people could dash to the country on Friday and return on Monday
exhausted after a race, a ball, a shoot or a political gathering.
(Although, as Mr Tinniswood points out, the phrase in polite circles
was still “Saturday-to-Monday”, to distinguish the leisured class
from those who had to be at work on Monday morning.) Women, in
particular, were confronted with gruelling social expectations: a
seven-day shooting party, for example, would require multiple outfits
for every day of the week, and spending whole seasons like this was
arduous.
Only a fraction of
all country houses, mansions and estates was destroyed. And new ones
were built. Philip Sassoon, a hyperactive Conservative politician,
built Port Lympne in Kent as a “fairy palace”—a gaudily
theatrical Cape Dutch-style red-brick mansion overlooking Romney
Marsh towards the English Channel. To its architect, it stood as a
declaration that “a new culture had risen up from the sickbed of
the old, with new aspirations.” There were modernist novelties,
too—Crowsteps near Newbury, Joldwynds in Surrey—shocking the
public with their shiny white walls, flat roofs and angular façades.
But these were anomalies: most of the design in this period was
backward-looking, as aristocrats and nouveaux-riches seeking
stability and refuge embarked on a frenzy of castle restorations in a
bid to “domesticate the past”.
The picture was
never uniform. Mr Tinniswood provides rich detail from all corners,
uncovering plenty of angst, but also much optimism—until 1939. When
the next war came, the idea returned that the world was lost,
symbolised, to many people, by the disappearance of domestic service
(which, contrary to some alarmist inter-war accounts, had held up
buoyantly for most of the preceding two decades). In the 1950s, the
National Trust came into its own as a flood of houses passed into its
stewardship. The “English Country House” became an object of
nostalgia. Mr Tinniswood’s book is a work of historical
scholarship, not heritage fetishism. For all its merits, though, it
still seems to be a product of the mindset. The English country house
casts a long, rose-tinted shadow.
From the print
edition: Books and arts
Waugh's
Country House: Through the Vita-glass Brightly
Posted on May 9,
2016 by Jeffrey Manley
A new book out this
week is described as a social history of the interwar period. This is
called The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House, 1918-1939
by Adrian Tunniswood and is reviewed in the current issue of The
Economist. According to portions of the book available on the
internet, Evelyn Waugh is cited on elements of country house style
and design. A discussion of country house modernization mentions an
ad featuring a refurbished 15c. house near Chelmsford with a
"Vita-glass sunroom" as well as a swimming pool. Tunniswood
cites Waugh's use of this same glass in his fictional creation of
Margot Beste-Chetwynde's replacement of her Tudor country house
King's Thursday by modernist architect Otto Silenus. In this new
structure, "the aluminium blinds shot up, and the sun poured in
through the Vita-glass, filling the room with beneficent rays."
(Decline and Fall, New York, 2012, p. 176). As explained by
Tunniswood, Vita-glass was a British invention that was marketed as
allowing into the house all the healthful ultra violet rays of the
sun (promoting suntan, vitamin D and even killing germs) just as
though one were outdoors, where one also had to cope with unheathful
English cold and damp.
In another context,
the book describes the transformation of socialite Sybil Colefax into
an interior decorator, necessary due to diminution of her husband's
income in the 1930s. The results of her work have not, according
Tunniswood, withstood the test of time. Evelyn Waugh recommended her
to his brother Alec to decorate his house at Edrington. Evelyn urged
that "you will be saved the kind of mistakes that are made by
decorators who are not used to dealing with persons of quality, and
she's businesslike" (Alec Waugh, Best Wine Last, London, 1978,
p. 57). Neither of these predictions turned out to be the case.
According to Alec, Colefax was always late for appointments, filled
the house with inappropriate furniture, and hung the drapery inside
out.
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