In 1973 we decided to set up the Farmyard at Chatsworth, to explain to the children that food is produced by farmers who also look after the land and that the two functions are inextricably mixed.
The milking demonstration is the highlight of the day. The audience remains riveted to the spot, fascinated, shocked and delighted by this twice-daily ritual. One little boy from the middle of Sheffield said to me: ‘It’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen in me life. I’ll never drink milk again.’
This reaction is not unusual, but you never know what is going to capture their imagination. A friend who farms in the Home Counties had a party of London children down for the day. He spent hours explaining the theory and practice of dairy farming and finally asked what had interested them most. After much nudging and giggling, one of them said: ‘Watching the cows go to the toilet.’
What happens to the milk from the very much tuberculin and brucellosis-accredited cows in our Farmyard? You are not allowed even to give away this dangerous stuff because it has only been cooled, not pasteurised, sterilised, homogenised or any other ‘ised’. If the children had so much as a taste we should be closed down pronto.
Amazingly, there are not (yet) any regulations forbidding calves to drink their natural food, so when they have had their share we, brave as lions, use the rest in the house. What my mother called unmurdered milk is quite different from the bought stuff, which has been through so many different processes it has lost its savour. Our homemade butter and thick cream is a daily delight and we all seem quite well on it.
It is not only children who are far removed from country matters. Some teachers who visit the Farmyard are surprised to hear that a cow has to have a calf before she gives milk; they don’t connect these two facts of life.
Nor is ignorance of the natural cycle confined to town dwellers. A well-known fund-raiser for rainforests (grown-up) lives deep in the West Country and often passed the garden of a friend of mine who grows dahlias. After the first frost of October, she telephoned my friend in a rage: ‘Why have you poisoned the dahlias? They are all dead and horrible and brown. How could you do such a thing?’ (The rainforest lady can never have read Mr Jorrocks’s joyful autumn cry, ‘Blister my kidneys, the dahlias are dead!’ But then I don’t suppose she approves of fox hunting.) Irritated beyond words, my friend answered: ‘Yes, and I’m going out now to do the same to all the oaks and beeches round here.’
My husband is an excellent fellow in every way, but he is not a countryman. The grass in the churchyard is an annual problem as it is in most villages. I suggested putting sheep in. Most suitable, I thought, Lamb of God, Sheep of my Hand, the very thing. ‘We can’t do that. Everyone will be furious.’ ‘Why? Isn’t it a simple and practical thing to do?’ But he was adamant and another untidy summer passed. When pressed for the real reason, he said: ‘Can’t you see, it’s out of the question – the sheep would lift their legs on the gravestones.’
Our Farmyard is popular (100,000 visitors a year) but it has its critics. A woman brought a party of children who are junior members of an animal welfare organisation. She wrote to tell me they enjoyed the day but there was a serious objection because the children were conducting a survey on how the animals are treated as an attraction for the public.
They liked the free-range chickens – until the children started their picnic and then they were exasperated by the close attentions of the chickens and suggested that they should be penned after all. They concluded that the trout in their big tanks were bored and that ‘the cluster of people round the rabbit pen put the animals in a predator/prey situation’. I really don’t know how to amuse bored trout and cannot cope with human predators, so I broke the rule of a lifetime and did not answer her letter.
Once a year, on Schools’ Countryside Day, we expand beyond the Farmyard to cover the whole estate. On Wednesday, 2,500 Derbyshire schoolchildren aged nine to eleven, and their teachers, spent the day in the park and saw the outdoor departments of the estate – farming, forestry and game – demonstrating their work.
Both teachers and children hear from the men whose lives are spent practising the mysteries of looking after the land and its products. Those of us brought up with them take all this for granted, but the vast majority have little idea of the seasonal toil which is an endless game of animal, vegetable and mineral.
Enormous tractors trundle over from our arable farm and bring potatoes, sheaves of wheat, barley, oats, linseed and oilseed rape. Except in the case of potatoes, few people know the difference between these crops, nor do they know their uses. When the wheat is pointed out it is vaguely connected with bread, but the rest are a complete mystery.
The gamekeepers’ plot is the most popular. The children are fascinated by the pheasant and partridge chicks, mallard ducklings, ferrets, traps (including some old traps, now illegal) and guns. They see clay pigeons shot. Some of the teachers have a try and some of the children say they would like to shoot the teachers. There is pandemonium over bagging the spent cartridge cases.
At the forestry demonstration, Paul, a young forester born and bred at Chatsworth, and Phil, explain how woods are planted, weeded, pruned, thinned and eventually felled and that the cycle is then repeated. Because trees take longer to mature than a human lifetime, it seems difficult to understand that this country’s only self-generating raw building material is a crop and has to be ‘managed’.
Trees produce the most extreme reactions. Paul told me: ‘On seeing the saws, several children remarked: “Do you enjoy killing trees? Don’t you feel guilty? Why don’t you blow them up with dynamite; surely that would be quicker? Do you only cut down trees to make money?”’
A head teacher asked: ‘Couldn’t you let the trees die naturally before you cut them down?’ Watching the mechanical tree harvester: ‘Don’t you use axes any more?’ Paul concluded that neither teachers nor children understood forestry. ‘They see it as legalised vandalism. Their idea that we only destroy is based on media coverage of rainforests. A few teachers thought we were pulling the wool over the children’s eyes but others were keen to know more.’
In desperation the young foresters pointed to the huge panorama all round with groups of trees young and old and Capability Brown’s plantations bordering the park and asked: ‘Do you like what you see?’ They answered: ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, that is what we do – we keep it looking like that.’
Those privileged to own land must explain to people who very naturally wish to use it for recreation what it costs in money and people to keep it looking attractive enough for them to want to ride, walk, run and sit on it. The beauty of the country was largely man-made in the days of cheap labour. Now that we are struggling to maintain the fine balance between man and nature, it would be helpful if walkers and other users understood the price of keeping hedges, stone walls, gates, farm and forest roads, streams and woods in order. In spite of the ever-thickening fog of bureaucracy the landowner still has the joy of ownership – but he also has all the responsibility and those who use the land have none.
The Farmyard, and now Schools’ Day, have had an effect on the Chatsworth men who meet the teachers and children. It has been brought home to them that their jobs are not understood by the majority of visitors. Wallers, keepers, drainers, foresters, sawyers, butchers in the Farm Shop, shepherds, tractor drivers and stock-men – all would like to spend some hours explaining their age-old skills brought sharply up to date. But how can they be spared from their jobs? Who is to pay for their time?
Who is to tell visitors that these are the people who make Chatsworth and its surroundings what it is? Chatsworth and similar places could be huge outdoor classrooms, but all any of us can do without encouragement from on high amounts to a drop in the ocean.
We are told that 67 people are leaving agriculture and associated industries every day. Could not some of these, not academics but the real people, return to their roots to teach?
Perhaps it isn’t worthwhile. I can see the day comin
g when gang mowers will cut the grass fields, the arable land will be left to its own thistly devices, paths through the woods will become impenetrable jungles for which ramblers will have to be armed with machetes. And then who would be killing the trees? We can drink French milk, eat Argentinian beef, import flour from America and timber from the Baltic. It would save a lot of work.
But I will grow a lettuce by the front door, just to prove I can.
Who are tourists? What are they? You, me, friends, relations, most of the people we know and millions we don’t. Why do we tour? What makes people come to Chatsworth?
It is no new phenomenon. The house has been open for people to see round ever since it was built. In the late eighteenth century the table was laid on ‘Open Days’ for anyone who wanted dinner.
In 1849, the railway reached Rowsley, three miles away, and brought 80,000 people to go round the house and garden that summer. The Duke gave instructions that the waterworks be played ‘for everyone, without exception’.
Huge crowds visited Chatsworth at the turn of the century on Bank Holiday weekends. The tour of the house and garden was free until 1908 and after that the fee – one shilling for adults and sixpence for children – was given to the local hospitals. It was not until 1947 that the revenue from the visitors went towards the upkeep of the place.
I have listened and talked to the people who have come here for nearly fifty years. The points of interest have changed, but the place has not – there is no fun fair and no entertainment except the house and its contents. The same goes for the garden. Perhaps that is why only the genuinely interested come. Vandalism and litter are not problems.
Forty years ago a regular remark from women seeing the cast-iron fireplaces in the state rooms was ‘look at all that black leading’. Few women under the age of seventy know what black leading is now.
They are still astonished by the size of the house. A girl who complained about the price of a ticket, saying she didn’t like paying so much to see a few old-fashioned rooms, reached the end of the tour and said: ‘I’m knackered. Bring me a chair.’
Attitudes towards places such as Chatsworth have changed completely in the last fifty years. After the war there was a strong feeling against privately owned big houses and estates.
In spite of this people came, if only to criticise. The government’s penal taxation laws were gleefully underlined by local government officials who did their best to make things difficult.
A typical instance was the vociferous lobby, instigated by the socialist MP for West Derbyshire and chairman of Derbyshire county council, to bring the A6 through the park a few yards from the house – an idea which would be unthinkable now.
The public has led the change in attitudes – conservation and preservation are all the rage and you are suddenly a hero for keeping the roof on; the cries of ‘pull it down’ from the 1950s and 1960s are long forgotten.
In 1976 the Duke of Bedford wrote a very funny letter to The Times about Woburn. He concluded that ‘the average person comes to historic houses because he has bought a car and needs to drive somewhere in it. The number that come for real enlightenment are so few that it is distressing.’
Twenty years on people want to see works of art. Television programmes such as the Antiques Roadshow, have sharpened interest in the objects displayed. And when a Jane Austen novel is adapted for television, the briefest glimpse of someone’s front door makes it an object of pilgrimage and crowds flock to see the hallowed spot.
A house lived in by the descendants of the family who built it is thought to be more interesting than one belonging to a government department or other organisation, however well presented. There is a keen curiosity about the incumbents.
American visitors find it impossible to believe that anyone actually lives in this Derbyshire Disneyland. Children ask: ‘Have they got satellite telly? Do they wear crowns? Was the duchess a girl groom?’
They are shocked by Laguerre’s naked figures on the painted ceilings and think them out of place in such a posh house.
I am often asked if we mind the lack of privacy during the summer months. On the contrary, I should mind if no one came. Chatsworth needs people to bring it to life.
We are lucky in that the place is so big there is space for all. It is so well built that when the state rooms are full of visitors you can sit in our part of the house below unaware there is anyone about. When it re-opens every spring it is intensely pleasing to be able to show people the results of our winter’s work.
Some visitors make surprising statements. There is a portrait of me by Lucian Freud, painted when I was thirty-four. It is said to be not exactly flattering. A woman was overheard saying in a gloomy voice: ‘That’s the dowager duchess.’ Then, even gloomier: ‘It was taken the year she died.’
A man, looking at Sargent’s picture of the Acheson Sisters in their exquisite long white dresses of the Belle Epoque, said to his wife: ‘Those are the Mitford girls. It is extraordinary to think two of them are still alive.’ It certainly is. It was painted in 1901.
And I didn’t know whether to be pleased or sorry when someone said to a warden: ‘I saw the duchess in the garden. She looked quite normal, really.’
The view from here is beautiful. Looking out of my window over the garden and the river to the park and the woods is a pleasure I never cease to enjoy. There are no telegraph poles, no concrete edges to the road, no double yellow lines or anything else vexatious to the eye. The people who come to walk here, like Lowry figures, give scale to the landscape. They lean on the parapet of the bridge gazing at the view from the opposite angle.
Morning and evening the park is empty of people, and the sheep and deer become its undisturbed tenants. On stormy days these ruminants are like weather vanes, telling you the direction of the wind as they choose to lie down in the lee of this hill or that. On the first hot day of the year the ewes crowd together under a tree for shade like old women at a meeting, and you know that spring has truly come.
Talking of sheep, the other day I needed a simple technical guide to the native breeds (over fifty of them). I rang up my friend, the secretary of the National Sheep Association, to ask if he had an idiot’s pamphlet on the subject. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we produced one for the Food and Farming Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1989.’ A gripping read it turned out to be.
The meaning of the words in the glossary stumped even language experts among my friends like Paddy Leigh Fermor and Jim Lees-Milne. One sheep disease has regional names of intriguing diversity: sturdy, bleb, turnstick, paterish, goggles, dunt and pendro are all gid. I looked up gid. No luck, it isn’t there. You, Dear Reader, are expected to know exactly what gid is, and I’m quite sure that you do.
In church at Edensor, while the glorious language of the 1662 Prayer Book with its messages of mystery and imagination fills the air, I find my mind wandering back to the Oxfordshire churches of my childhood, first at Asthall and then at Swinbrook, where the same language was spoken in different surroundings.
Both St Mary’s Swinbrook and St Peter’s Edensor have seventeenth-century memorials which are worth going a long way to see. At Swinbrook, they commemorate two generations of the Fettiplace family, who owned the surrounding land till the male line died out in the nineteenth century. The subjects, who are weighed down by stone armour and lie stiffly on their sides, are of about the same date and as arrestingly beautiful as the memorial to Bess of Hardwick’s10 Cavendish sons in Edensor church.
The feel, smell and taste of the oak pews at Swinbrook (I suppose that all children lick pews under cover of praying for their guinea pigs) are not the same as those at Edensor. They were put in by my father, who paid for them with the money he won by backing a long-priced Grand National winner owned by a cousin. He wanted a horse’s head carved on the end of each one, but the Bishop would not allow such frivolity, which was hypocritical of him, as I am sure he knew the source of my father’s bounty perfectly well.
Sixty-six years ago, my
sister Diana, aged fourteen, played the organ at Asthall. She thought any tune would do for the voluntary as long as it was played slowly enough. ‘Tea For Two’ was repeated again and again, unrecognised (or so she says) while waiting for the moment when the Venite was sung to more predictable music. We don’t get those surprises at Edensor because we have a proper organist. The sermons are preached in the parson’s own voice, not a put-on holy one. They are the best I have ever heard.
Now Christmas is upon us again. Everyone is a year older and there will be some new actors in the nativity play, which is given by the Pilsley schoolchildren in the Painted Hall at Chatsworth (the audience has out-grown the chapel). The furious faces of some of the older boys, with their dishcloth head-dresses and dressing-gown cords all over the place, reflect the expressions of the descendants of the figures they are supposed to represent and whose photographs we see daily in the press.
Thousands of people come to walk in the park at Chatsworth all the year round. There is no way of telling how many, because it is free. Most people enjoy it, or presumably they wouldn’t come, but every now and again a letter of criticism arrives.
Last week a woman wrote to say she was ‘disgusted by the animal faeces on the grass, every few feet’ and that she and her grandchildren couldn’t play ball games in case of stepping on them. Oh dear. I suppose she wants us to buy a giant Hoover to attach to the JCB and sweep 1,000 acres of well-stocked ground before breakfast in case she gets her new shoes dirty. Sorry, Madam, but you had better go and find some municipally mown grass where your unhappy grandchildren can play their clinically clean games without the fear of stepping on the unspeakable. What a frightful grandmother you must be.
There is nothing like a spot of flattery to cheer one up, especially when it comes in an unexpected and roundabout way.
Roy Hattersley is a regular visitor to these parts. When writing a piece for the Guardian, he described his dream house, which he discovered when walking in the backwaters of Baslow, a mile or so by footpath from Chatsworth. He felt he could live in it happily ever after. Good.
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