Thursday 24 January 2019

Three Books: Splendour & Squalor by Marcus Scriven / Through the Keyhole: Sex, Scandal and the Secret Life of the Country House by Susan C. Law / Country House Society: The Private Lives of England’s Upper Class After the First World War by Pamela Horn




Splendour & Squalor by Marcus Scriven: review
Christopher Silvester is entertained by an account of the life and crimes of the aristocracy in Marcus Scriven's Splendour & Squalour
By Christopher Silvester11:20AM GMT 23 Dec 2009

"In as far as they developed talents, it was to misapply them; in as far as they were aware of their own deficiencies, it was to ignore them.” Thus does Marcus Scriven introduce his cast of four scapegrace aristocrats, whose lives coincided with a wider decline of aristocratic power in the 20th century. These are Edward FitzGerald, 7th Duke of Leinster, an inveterate gambler known as the “bedsit duke” after the ignominious accommodations to which he was ultimately reduced; Victor Hervey, 6th Marquess of Bristol, who was sent to prison as a jewellery thief in his youth and subsequently struggled to overcome this stigma; Angus Montagu, 12th Duke of Manchester, who was dubbed the “Crook of Manchester” by the News of the World after being jailed for fraud in his mid-fifties; and Hervey’s estranged son John Jermyn, 7th Marquess of Bristol, a cocaine and heroin addict who was twice jailed for drugs offences and impelled to raid his own tomb to pay for his hedonistic habits, before dying prematurely.

FitzGerald arguably made one of the worst bargains in history when he mortgaged the entire future income from his family estates during his lifetime (once he had inherited his title from his mentally incapacitated brother) to the financier Sir Henry Mallaby-Deeley. In return, Sir Henry agreed to pay off FitzGerald’s gambling debts of £67,500 and to give him a lifetime annual allowance of £1,000. Predicated on the assumption that Edward’s brother would live for a long time, the bargain came into operation a mere 17 months later, though were it not for this agreement Edward would almost certainly have dissipated his family fortune in some other way. He may not have been vicious, but he was “driven by an incendiary wilfulness” and careless in causing pain to others. “His wives, and other women,” Scriven notes, “usually died unhappily – variously overdosed, drowned or demented.”

Hervey seems to have been the most monstrous of all these characters. At Eton, he assaulted a fellow schoolboy with a knuckle-duster and was expelled for keeping a book. His annual allowance while at school was £1,000 (a staggering £269,000 in today’s money). He had been abandoned by an unloving mother early in his childhood and inherited his title from his distant father at the age of 19. He sought to compensate for this lack of parental affection with a “lifelong shriek for attention”, even inventing stories about heroic exploits during the Spanish Civil War. His conviction for jewellery theft in 1939 became confused in the minds of others with a more notorious hotel robbery involving violence that had taken place at around the same time. Thus he “came to be remembered for a crime he did not commit – an oddly appropriate fate for this most delusional of men”. His business enterprises were disappointing rather than disastrous, but his treatment of his eldest son was shameful.

Angus Montagu’s “hunger for companionship, for cosseting, never diminished”. His father and older brother kept him at a distance. Like Hervey, he was a fantasist. His desperate craving for affection rendered him vulnerable to unscrupulous business colleagues, who implicated him in a fraudulent transaction. He was likeable and generous, but a hopeless figure when it came to earning a living.

Jermyn was more gifted than the other three black sheep in this book. He had business acumen and a core of decency, but was ravaged by drug addiction. Scriven includes a chilling description from a friend of how Jermyn would “chase the dragon” (smoke heroin) and drink Vodka Collins while in command of a helicopter, then switch on the autopilot while he took a brief snooze, only waking just before he reached his destination. Like the others, though, he liked to cast himself as the “perpetual victim” of his upbringing.

There is no particular lesson to be drawn from this quartet of misspent lives. Instead, their capacities for self-destruction and self-delusion are to be wondered at. Scriven guides us through each catalogue of errors with relish and wit, but at the same time invites us to pity his subjects for the horrible failings of their parents. When Jermyn, who was bisexual, decided to marry, his father, Victor Hervey, by now a tax exile in Monaco, decided not to attend the ceremony. He rubbed salt in the wound, taking out an advertisement in The Times to say that he would not be attending his son’s wedding because of a prior engagement in London.

Splendour & Squalor: the Disgrace and Disintegration of Three Aristocratic Dynasties by Marcus Scriven


Scandalous tales of excess, self-indulgence and sleaze among British aristocrats
Thu, Dec 31, 2009, 00:00
PATRICK SKENE CATLING



Splendour Squalor By Marcus Scriven Atlantic, 397pp, £25

SCHADENFREUDE IS a German word with no one-word English equivalent. But the neurotic kink it denotes, the delight derived from another person’s misfortune, is universal. Never before have I read a book that so relentlessly exemplifies this human foible as Marcus Scriven’s collection of case histories of British aristocrats staggering down the primrose path to perdition.

The stomachs of many otherwise normal readers have long been inured to any amount of garbage, with appetites whetted for scandal, no matter how loathsome, especially if it discredits members of families once rich and powerful and considered to be socially superior.

Scriven writes in the manner of an indignant moralist as he doles out the sleaze. Though he has chosen four extreme examples of aristocratic squalor, he evidently abominates the whole House of Lords and all its unearned privileges. His book’s epigraph is a quotation from Denis Healey, one of the Labour Party’s most acerbic veterans of the class war: “The upper classes in every country are selfish, depraved, dissolute and decadent.”

Scriven read history at Oxford University. There are fleeting passages in this book, his first, indicating that he is still seriously interested in the subject. The decline of the English landed gentry began in the 19th century, he relates, when the great landowners’ income from their land shrank from colossal to merely enormous.

One factor he cites is the importation of grain in refrigerator ships. The industrial revolution created rival new wealth in the cities. In spite of increased taxation, hereditary peerages maintained potent though diminished influence in the 20th century, but the aristocratic mystique was irreparably corrupted by the sale of titles during the Lloyd George premiership, a practice that has continued to the present day.

“At the end of the 17th century,” Scriven writes, “there had been only 19 dukes, three marquesses, and a total of 152 earls, viscounts and barons.” By the end of the 20th century there were more than 1,000 of them.

Scriven presents five genealogical pages of “simplified and selective lineages” of his four principal scapegoats, diagrams of complex family interrelationships between Fitzgeralds, Duncombes, Grahams, Herveys, Montagus and others.

Then he gets down to spilling the beans. He concentrates on men who were recreationally obsessed not so much with hunting, shooting and fishing as with drink, drugs, gambling and bisexual promiscuity.

“Adultery,” Scriven writes, “was invariably a useful antidote to the inexpressible boredom of so much aristocratic life.”

Edward Fitzgerald, the seventh duke of Leinster, ran through £400 million, suffered a series of bankruptcies and took his own life; Victor Hervey, the sixth marquess of Bristol, was sentenced to three years’ penal servitude for a jewel robbery; Angus Montagu, the “absurdly stupid” and grossly overweight 12th duke of Manchester, spent time in a prison in Virginia and ended up broke; John Hervey, the drug-addicted, homosexual seventh marquess of Bristol, had a New York entourage of “le tout Eurotrash”, collected luxurious cars, of which the most ostentatious was “an eight-seater, six-door Mercedes previously owned by pope Paul VI and rock star Rod Stewart”, and is believed to have shot a peacock.

According to Scriven, it has often been said that the Herveys were “genetically destined for damnation: programmed for lives of cruelty, self-indulgence, untamed lust and ultimate self-destruction”.

By the end of my wade through all this, I turned with relief from Burke’s peerage to the relative purity of the pigs in Animal Farm.




Through the Keyhole: Sex, Scandal and the Secret Life of the Country House
by Susan C. Law

Scandal existed long before celebrity gossip columns, often hidden behind the closed doors of the Georgian aristocracy. But secrets were impossible to keep in a household of servants who listened at walls and spied through keyholes. The early mass media pounced on these juicy tales of adultery, eager to cash in on the public appetite for sensation and expose the shocking moral corruption of the establishment. Drawing on a rich collection of original and often outrageous sources, this book brings vividly to life stories of infidelity in high places – passionate, scandalous, poignant and tragic. It reveals how the flood of print detailing sordid sexual intrigues created a national outcry and made people question whether the nobility was fit to rule.
Susan C. Law is a journalist and historian. Her work has been published in a wide range of newspapers and magazines, including The Times Higher Education Supplement, BBC History Magazine and London Evening Standard. Dr Law completed her PhD in History at Warwick University, and has spent many years researching the 18th and 19th century aristocracy, servants, family life and country houses.

A deft analysis of sex, power, and the media in the Regency era describes how the scandalous private lives of the Georgian aristocracy were used to undermine hereditary power
The potent allure of sex, money, and power has always created a public appetite for juicy tales of scandal in the hidden private lives of the English aristocracy. Millions of viewers are captivated by the television series Downton Abbey and screen versions of Jane Austen novels, while visitor numbers to National Trust stately homes have never been higher. The real and fictional dramas being enacted inside country houses were just as compelling for audiences in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the cultural media of the day exploited stories of aristocratic adultery for commercial and political motives in newspapers, novels, and satirical prints. But such attacks on the aristocracy’s moral fitness to rule ultimately undermined traditional hereditary power and marked the first steps towards its decline. This book draws on a rich collection of original sources, bringing vividly to life a cast of engaging characters and their stories of infidelity—passionate, scandalous, poignant, and tragic.




Country House Society: The Private Lives of England’s Upper Class After the First World War by Pamela Horn

When the cataclysm of the First World War impacted on British society, it particularly affected the landed classes, with their long military tradition. Country houses, as in a variety of popular TV dramas, were turned into military hospitals and convalescent homes, while many of the menfolk were killed or badly injured in the hostilities. When the war ended efforts were made to return to the pre-war world. Pleasure seeking in night-clubs, sporting events and country-house weekends became the order of the day. Many of the old former rituals such as presentation at Court for debutantes and royal garden parties were revived. Yet, overshadowing all were the economic pressures of the decade as increased taxation, death duties and declining farm rentals reduced landed incomes. Some owners sold their mansions or some land to newly enriched businessmen who had prospered as a result of the war. Others turned to city directorships to make ends meet or, in the case of the women, ran dress shops and other small businesses. The 1920s proved a decade of flux for High Society, with the light-hearted dances, treasure hunts and sexual permissiveness of the 'Bright Young People' contrasting with the financial anxieties and problems faced by their parents' generation. Pamela Horn draws on the letters and diaries of iconic figures of the period, such as Nancy Mitford and Barbara Cartland, to give an insight into this new post-war era.


REVIEW: Country House Society: The Private Lives of England’s Upper Class After the First World War by Pamela Horn
January 2, 2014 by Evangeline Holland

Country House Society: The Private Lives of England's Upper Class After the First World War by Pamela Horn
The late social historian Pamela Horn is in top form with her final release, Country House Society: The Private Lives of England’s Upper Class After the First World War. I own a number of Dr. Horn’s books, and prize them for her thoroughness, her compulsively readable prose, and her unerring ability to let primary sources (letters, diaries, memoirs, articles) speak through her writing. Country House Society is no different–in six lengthy chapters, Horn takes us through the swift changes to English high society in the wake of the Great War.

Though many hoped to turn the clock backwards to 1914, the carnage and destruction of the war proved to be a point of no return for both aristocrats and the people who served them. I winced a bit while reading about the crippling costs of the great landed estates:

In July 1921…in a leading article headed ‘Landowners Bled White’, Country Life examined a number of ‘typical’ estates selected from different parts of Scotland. In one case the figures showed that whereas parish and borough rates, land tax, heritor’s assessment, and other public and parochial burdens had amounted to £2,320 in 1911–12, by 1920–21 they had climbed to £4,838. The costs of management had similarly grown from £1,210 in 1911–12 to £1,677 in 1920–21, while renewals, repairs and improvements had risen from £3,069 at the earlier date to £4,983. Income tax had nearly quadrupled, from £636 in 1911–12 to £2,342 in 1920–21. No personal expenses, according to Country Life, were included in these figures.

A very interesting section of the book deals with the General Strike of 1926, where young men arrived from Oxford and Cambridge and debutantes set aside their ballgowns to became “scabs” when 1.7 million workers in the transport and heavy industries set down their tools. The irony of how willing the aristocrats were to pitch in to keep the country running is that this very action further marginalized the working classes once the strike ended. Furthermore, beneath the “froth” of the chapters devoted to the London Season and other social pursuits, there lurked the frenetic melancholy and unease of both the Edwardians and their Bright Young Thing offspring that lingered from WWI. Horn does not fail to present a biting, yet balanced portrait of the hedonistic coterie of upper class men and women who took their fun a bit too far. Though Country House Society does discuss life in the 1930s, the focus is mostly on the 1920s, before the Wall Street Crash and the rise of Hitler made frivolity and selfishness appear in poor taste. Accompanying the text are 16 pages of fantastic photographs and period illustrations.

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