It is the same with the Health Service and Education. They were hopeless, people said, until their ministers tried to improve them. Now the cry is, leave our hospitals alone and don’t interfere with the schools.
Who says we are not conservative?
September 1993
Debate At The Cambridge Union
In autumn 2003, to his surprise and delight, Andrew received an invitation from the president of the Cambridge Union to take part in a debate. He accepted without hesitation. The rather curious motion was: ‘This house would rather be an aristocrat than a democrat’. He was asked to speak for the aristocrats. The old warhorse in him smelt an agreeable battle ahead.
Years ago, he had taken part in another debate at the Union and remembered the atmosphere as antagonistic – to say the least – towards someone like him and he expected to find the same again only with knobs on. Imagine his surprise when the president wrote with the final arrangements – times for drinks and dinner, and dress black tie. That such an outfit should have shaken off its mothballs and re-emerged at a student debate was a huge surprise. Where are the jeans of yesteryear? What has precipitated such a change? Instead of missiles – from soggy bread-rolls indoors to more serious weaponry in the street – he found nothing but good manners and a student dinner-companion of such charm he has been talking about her ever since.
You will be surprised to hear that the motion was carried by the democrats, the poor old aristocrats biting the dust as usual. Andrew abstained. I am told by someone who was there that when he finished speaking the applause was loud and prolonged. ‘So what did you say?’ I asked. ‘Oh, I can’t remember.’ But the audience had laughed – and that was the point.
February 2004
Changing Language
In 1994 I wrote a piece for Country Life about changes in our language on rural matters: country turning into countryside, hedges into hedgerows, bogs into wetlands and so on. Weather forecasters have changed the age-old Scottish ‘hills’ of poets, shepherds and sportsmen into ‘mountains’. ‘Home is the hunter from the mountain’? Surely not. The new words are longer and sound more important but the additions are unnecessary for meaning.
We know that language changes. Sixty years on, who would say Great Scott, By Jove, vamp, scram, mannequin, blighter, shut-eye, copper (or Bobby for that matter)? Many would not even know what the words mean. Swank, spiffing, pansy and top-hole have gone with the wind. So have those dressing-table necessities cold cream and vanishing cream. Capital, conked out and topping have also disappeared. Cars don’t have chokes any more (they hardly have gears and their windows have given up winding down).
Shoot used to mean a cheery gathering of friends bent on a day’s sport. If pheasants are the quarry, it will take place during the darkest season of the year; if partridges, it is likely to be in October; if it’s in August, you’ll be on a grouse moor. But whatever the weather, you go. Today a shoot can mean a crowd of curiously dressed young men and women, one of whom is king of the camera. In spite of being armed with huge silver umbrellas they don’t go out in the rain, so in this part of England there is a lot of waiting about. It makes for frayed tempers as there is a deadline to be met for the fashion magazines. Nothing could be more different from the other kind of shoot.
A stalker was, and still is, a man whose name is likely to begin with Mc. He wears a fore-and-aft hat and crawls on his stomach over bog and rock, spying for a stag, and he is often in charge of an amateur behind a rifle. Today he is also someone who takes a fancy to (usually) a woman and can actually be arrested for his trouble. Stalking is now a criminal offence.
There is a new vocabulary spawned by technology, most of it as ugly as blog. A web is nothing to do with spiders (or lies) and is used a thousand times a day by all. The same goes for net.
Technology apart, change gallops on. Words are as much driven by fashion as are hats. The chosen ones are done to death till they lose their impact. Icon, for instance. Icons are everywhere, chiefly actors and actresses or television people. Iconic describes anything desirable till he, she or it falls from grace because of a scandal to do with money or sex (though the latter sometimes adds to the fascination). The dictionary says an icon is ‘a representation of some sacred personage, itself regarded as sacred, and honoured with a relative worship’. I suppose this is how those people and objects are seen, but everyday use has devalued the word and no doubt we shall soon hear of a new one to describe ‘anything venerated or uncritically admired’.
Consumer is a funny one. It seems we are all consumers not just of food and drink, which you can understand because we have to consume them to stay alive, but of everything we buy. How can you consume a sofa? Or a string of pearls, a car or a cruise? Perhaps an obese person could open a vast mouth and cram in a piano or two before sending for the fire brigade to recover them, but it is unlikely. We must all give it some thought. Meanwhile lunch is ready and I will consume it.
Market place and workshop worry me. I think of the former as where Bakewell Market happens every Monday – cattle and sheep at one end and at the other a thrilling mixture of kitchen gadgets, stuff by the yard, household goods, clothes, fruit and veg, all under dripping canvas and cheaper than in the shops – cheerful bargains on every stall. I am wrong. Market place applies to where anything is bought and sold, including the antics of City traders in their shirtsleeves yelling at each other down telephones without a cow or sheep in sight – and certainly not in mind.
Surely a workshop is a shed where carpenters in aprons and other talented men make something. Saws, hammers and chisels hang in neat patterns on the wall and the floor is deep in wood shavings and sawdust. But the word has been bagged by the ubiquitous actors and actresses who speak of a theatre workshop – the next best thing to an oxymoron, to my mind. There are theatres and there are workshops but they don’t go together.
An issue is as common as an icon and is beginning to replace a problem. I don’t like the sound of it, conjuring up as it does the woman in the Bible with an issue of blood. Politicians are very keen on them. There is usually more than one and they can’t make up their minds as to what to do with them. They spin out the time, unresolved, till a more urgent issue comes along, which is almost at once.
You can’t hide behind transparency because you can see through it. Mr Blair was as transparent as they come and full of issues which you could also see through. Everything has to go through a process. A peace process is the favourite, perhaps because there are so many wars. The United States is enduring an electoral process and I am about to get out of bed and follow a dressing process. Quite a business and one that involves a strategy as well. Generals used to be the ones for that, conducting a campaign and manoeuvring an army. Now strategy is used instead of ‘plan’, I suppose because it sounds better, more urgent, with a warlike ring to it.
Don’t forget scenario. Back to the theatre: ‘An outline of a dramatic work scene by scene’, says the dictionary. It is dangerously close to strategy, both words used to enliven dull sentences and brighten up dull lives by constant reference to the stage. If you don’t look out you’ll be back in that theatre workshop where you can deal with strategic scenarios in the company of icons.
When I was a shopkeeper I was forever sourcing things. Unwittingly, though; I thought I had just found them. The source of the Thames is there all right, mysterious and romantic, but it is quite different from trudging down the aisles of Consumer Goods at Trade Fairs, yet I was sourcing the day away on that ploy.
Rooms are spaces. You can’t fill them with consumer goods because they must be minimalist, i.e. empty. A drawing room, once a withdrawing room, is no longer. It must be just a space – there is nowhere to withdraw to. It cannot be a drawing space because that is a studio, which has another meaning. The unhappy tenant of a studio is not a draughtsman but just a person who has been squashed into a very small space by a greedy landlord.
Bureaucrats love putting things in place. I think it means s
tarting something – but that is often an initiative. So you put your initiative in place. This is after it has been vetted by a few committees, some planners and a panel of experts. The whole thing is soon forgotten. Even so, it could become an issue before you’ve had time to ask an icon to open it.
Watch out for initiative. Don’t, whatever you do, use your own. You’ll break the law and bring Health and Safety running. It is better to quash it before the process begins or you will be branded as a menace to society. The mere idea of doing anything without consulting consultants is too risky even for a risk assessor to put in place and drive forward. And a road map? Oh, PLEASE…
If you mind any of this, never fear, it will be all change soon and we can rest in peace.
Deportment
After spending a day in Oxford during term time, I have been wondering what has happened to deportment. Isn’t it high time it was brought back as a compulsory class at school? I suppose there would be a riot and the Narkover-type pupils of today would knife the teacher before the lesson could begin.
If only the girls could see themselves in their expensive, creased jumble, slouching about, faces hidden by curtains of hair, compared to how they would look if they carried themselves like Edwardian beauties. There would come about a change which would cheer things up no end wherever young people congregate.
The girls are just as pretty as they always were but they go to amazing lengths to hide it. Yet they spend fortunes on make-up and tragic coverings, which can hardly be described as clothes.
I think they must be longing to sit on juries, for we are repeatedly told that anyone who is clean, tidy and stands up straight is objected to for jury service without further reason.
June 1986
Christmas At Chatsworth
Little was made of Christmas at Chatsworth in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as, strangely enough, there were no Cavendish children there for nearly a hundred years. It all came to life early in the twentieth century when the newly refurbished theatre became the scene of home-made entertainment of the most sophisticated kind. Professional singers and amateur members of the week-long house parties sang and acted sketches, with King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra heading the guest list at the regular annual shoots of the 8th Duke of Devonshire and his German duchess. The audience was magnificently dressed and glittering in diamonds.
In 1908 Victor (9th Duke) and Evelyn arrived with their large family. In due course they had twenty-one grandchildren, who made the Christmases of the 1920s and 1930s memorable. The parents came with their maids and valets, the children with their nannies, grooms and ponies (they hunted with the High Peak Harriers on Boxing Day). Some of the nannies were keenly aware of the status of their charges. My sisters-in-law remember being told to sit on their luggage in a passage while their nanny demanded the best night-nursery, already occupied by Stuart cousins who had arrived earlier. On the insistence of Nanny, the cousins were ousted in favour of the preferred Cavendish girls.
Granny Evelyn had a famous cook, Mrs Tanner, who trained under Escoffier no less. She left books of receipts which show that the Christmas food was rich and rare – so were the menus, which seemed to go on for ever. The dining room, schoolroom and nursery all had different menus. The unlucky children had to eat the hateful bland food thought suitable for their ages. Even the Christmas puddings were made of different ingredients according to where they would be eaten. Those for the staff were mostly suet and breadcrumbs mixed with stout and milk, whereas Mrs Tanner’s ‘Best Christmas Pudding, Buckingham Palace receipt’ included French plums, stoned raisins and half muscatels, plus half a bottle of brandy – underlining the great unfairness of life.
With my own family in Oxfordshire it was different. Seven of us children were a solid start. My mother gave a tea party for the Asthall and Swinbrook schoolchildren on Christmas Eve, with the parson as Father Christmas. She bought and wrapped a toy and a garment for each child and took infinite trouble over the list of ages and sexes. One year she settled on penknives for the boys. Today these innocents would find themselves in the police station.
Christmas Day routine never varied for us. Early-morning opening of stockings, church, undoing presents (‘the festival of paper’, my mother called it), lunch of turkey and a plum pudding with sixpences, bachelor’s buttons and other anti-Health and Safety charms embedded in it, and, after dark, a card game so simple that the youngest and stupidest of the children (me) could play. Fancy dress in the evening – anything to hand was seized on. My sister Nancy was always the most imaginative. My father’s only concession was to wear a red wig. He took the group photograph so was never in it. My mother must have been thankful when it was all over.
It starts in October now. The Chatsworth Farm Shop is packed with things to eat and people to buy them, its reputation having spread since its quiet start in 1976, when we had planning permission to sell only hunks of freezer meat. The hampers are sent hither and thither to corporate and private buyers galore. Some, I’m glad to say, prefer ours to those of the famous London shops. The butchery counter is crammed with 745 turkeys, 50 geese, 400 hams and a goodly show of our own beef and lamb.
Our children, grandchildren and fourteen great-grandchildren come to stay in alternate years. It is odd having middle-aged grandchildren, and some of the greats are getting on. The change in them in two years is fascinating to see. The five-year-old, who told an enquiring schoolfriend last year that he was going to a public house for Christmas, will probably give a dissertation on Euclid next year when he is seven. Stone passages apparently constructed for roller-skating come in useful when it is wet. There are hazards which make it more exciting, like a long ramp where you get up the speed to crash into the door of the boiler room, hundreds of yards and two staircases away from the comparative safety of the nursery.
For the intervening Christmases come old (very) friends – ninety-two is the oldest this year – plus a wheelchair cousin who will be whirled up and down the corridors by a nine-year-old, I hope with some notion of safety.
It’s no good sinking into a chair after lunch. Whatever the weather the hens must be fed. The midwinter light soon disappears and no sensible hen stays out of doors after dark or the foxes, which our government adores, would get their all-time Christmas dinner.
In 2001, the spectre of foot-and-mouth caused havoc at Chatsworth. Andrew suggested the house should stay open till Christmas to recoup the losses, and so it has remained. People come from all over England to see it decorated and lit by candles (yes, candles) and the house-shops turn into fairyland. No one from outside advises. The house staff do it and seem to be inspired, so the result pleases all who come.
Well, nearly all. One year I got a letter saying how awful the tinsel wreaths round the heads of Roman busts were (‘tacky’) and what frightful taste I have to allow such a travesty. So we can’t please everyone, but I think Christmas without tinsel, however Roman the heads, would simply not be Christmas.
October 2005
The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home
by Peter Mandler
‘Aristocracy’, says the dictionary, means ‘government of a state by its best citizens’. All over now – more’s the pity – and the so-called aristocrat, now powerless, is hardly the word to describe the latter-day villains of this book. As builders of the stately homes, they started off quite well. Hatfield, Penshurst, Burghley, Haddon, Hardwick and Co. were all open to the public in the eighteenth century. A hundred years later the railways brought big crowds and it was still considered the people’s right to be shown round these houses, romanticised by the Victorians. Entry was free.
It was a shock when Lord Sackville, a crusty old chap who disliked his fellow men, closed Knole in the 1880s. There was a near-revolution in Sevenoaks where the tradespeople depended on the trippers. One or two owners began to charge to reduce numbers but it was the 4th Earl of Warwick who, in 1886, actually set about turning his castle into an asset rather than a liability. His fami
ly continued to do so till 1978, when they eventually succumbed to a tempting offer from Madame Tussaud.
Peter Mandler lumps owners together as if they were a breed of dog when, in fact, they are as individual as their houses. It is their problems and interests which are the same. The Lords Warwick get the publicity, but for one of them there are dozens of steady people who look after their inheritance, as well as carrying out endless local duties, which the author finds too boring to mention. The silent majority still in situ seem to me to have ridden out the storms of punitive taxes, recurring agricultural depressions, wars, pestilence and Lloyd’s, with judgement and rectitude.
Mr Mandler seems to be unaware that the statelies have attendant cottages, farm roads and buildings, and endless outgoings that must be paid for, as well as the upkeep of the houses themselves. Pensions? Not mentioned. Forestry is deemed to be an asset. In all the years I have lived near trees they have been a constant drain on estate resources. The author often mentions, but fails to understand, the Englishman’s deep-seated love of his land.
The unfortunate owners can’t do right. If, like Lord Montagu, they try and make a go of the place, they are greedy. If they are forced by taxation to sell up, they are running away. If they sell what is loosely called a ‘work of art’ to pay for new lead on the roof, they are ‘threatening the integrity of the house’. But if holes in the roof allow the Old Master drawings and rare books to get wet there is not much integrity left.
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