by Pamela Horn
The Duke of Westminster, too, always held a large house party for the Grand National. In 1930, according to Loelia, his third wife, whom he had married only a few weeks beforehand, this involved conveying his guests from Eaton by a special train. On arrival at Aintree they were supplied with badges which gave entrance to the grandstand. In the evening there was a dinner and dance, attended also by house parties from some of the neighbouring families. Chester Races, held nearer at hand, were similarly marked by a large house party at Eaton. In this case, a fleet of cars ferried the guests to and from the racecourse.30
However, it was the Ascot race week which was regarded as the high point of the London Season, with many house parties organised and those grandees who did not own a property in the area often renting accommodation. According to The Bystander in June 1925, the larger houses were particularly popular, while at Windsor the king and queen, as always, entertained a large party.31 For Lady Astor at Cliveden, Ascot was the pinnacle of her social year. The Astors’ large house beside the River Thames was filled with guests and their servants, as well as by the Cliveden domestic staff, upon whose skills and efficiency the smooth running of the household depended. That applied to both the indoor and outdoor servants, for Lady Astor insisted that the grounds and gardens must look their best. Frank Copcutt, who came to the estate in 1928, and was soon appointed the decorator, remembered that not only had he to arrange the flowers and plants in the house, but buttonholes and sprays had to be prepared for the racing party. ‘There would be a large selection so that the ladies could choose those that went with their colour scheme for the day. The carnations for the men were again in different colours and sizes.32
Rosina Harrison, Nancy Astor’s lady’s maid, remembered that all the servants ‘used to heave a sigh of relief when Ascot week was over’. For most, it meant working for eighteen hours a day during the preceding fortnight, in order to complete the necessary preparations, and with no time off allowed: ‘none of us had been out of the grounds, and so it happened year in, year out’.33 Nor did all the guests choose to go to the races, so special catering arrangements were made for them at Cliveden. Lady Astor herself, indeed, usually attended on one day only, while Lord Winterton did not go at all when he spent Ascot week at Cliveden in June 1920. But he enjoyed the other social diversions on offer. There was usually tennis before dinner and dancing in the evening. On 21 June, he noted, ‘Very sad that a delicious week of fun and feasting & innocent enjoyment is over; the whole thing had the Cliveden impress and atmosphere. Hated going back to the workaday world.’34 The previous August he had visited Cliveden to join in the celebrations for the coming of age of Bobby Shaw, Lady Astor’s son from her first marriage to a fellow American. A large party of family and friends assembled and Winterton and the ‘younger and more frivolous … went on the river in an electric punt of Bobby’s and took our lunch’. The following day he boated, basked in the sun, ‘played golf, [ate] and slept’. When he left on 24 August he felt ‘much better and rested. There is something very delightful and cheerful and restful about this house with its bright colours, newpin cleanliness and hundreds of books. Nancy and Waldorf … came in after dinner and we played some children’s games. Great fun. Nancy in her old form.’35
Later in August he spent a week at Barons Court, an Irish country house, where he fished, went boating on the lake and umpired a cricket match between some of the younger house party members plus several indoor servants against a team selected from among the gardeners. ‘The House won’. But it was the restful pursuit of fishing that occupied most of his leisure at Barons Court, although he was not very successful.36
These different events were welcome additions to the social calendar. However, the two major sports which attracted the rural elite, and those who aspired to join them, were foxhunting and shooting. One writer has seen them as offering ‘networks of sociability: an extension of school and Oxbridge, the London Club and (increasingly) the professional association’.37 Of Lord Redesdale it was said ‘he lived for … sport. He fished, he shot, he coursed hares … A day’s shooting was what he loved most in the world, and his guns were his most sacred possessions.’38
Hunts have been rather pompously described as ‘voluntary bodies within rural society, run by enthusiasts’ and yet attracting ‘a broad penumbra of less-committed sportsmen and women, many of whom shifted allegiance from hunt to hunt’. Hunting and shooting also affected the management and the appearance of the countryside. Foxhunting, for instance, inhibited the use of barbed wire as an inexpensive and effective fencing material because of its potentially harmful effect on horses. Hence negotiations had to be entered into between farmers and hunt committees to arrange for wire to be taken down during the hunting season, at the hunt’s expense, and for compensation to be paid where necessary for this and for poultry losses resulting from foxes entering the chicken runs.
Lord Winterton, who claimed to have ridden with thirty-eight different hunts during his career and who was Master of the Chiddingfold Hunt in Sussex for seven years, noted how before the season began he went round local farms to make sure the wire was removed. On 23 September 1919, he did ‘some useful work with Eric Bonham seeing farmers about wire’. Two days later he again rode ‘round and saw various farmers’.39 There could be no doubt of his personal commitment to the sport. In his autobiography he described a ‘good pack of hounds well hunted’ as ‘a joy to behold’. Nor did he mind about the nature of the terrain over which he rode:
I enjoy following a good pack of hounds, well hunted, on a first class scenting day after a fox which is making a point in the jungles of my native Sussex or on the moors and amid the bogs of some countries in the West or North just as much as I enjoy riding … after a pack in similar conditions over the glorious grass of Leicestershire or Northamptonshire … I have no use for the man or woman who, having been brought up in a good hunting country, says of a difficult ‘provincial’ one that it is not worth hunting.40
In all, by 1928 there were 184 packs of hounds kept by hunts in England and Wales.41
Shooting, too, affected the management of the countryside not only through the potential damage to crops caused by large numbers of game birds but by the restrictions imposed on access to land by owners of shoots. This sometimes led to clashes with hunt supporters, who resented the efforts to exclude hounds from entering coverts until 1 February, when the game season ended. There were tensions, too, when gamekeepers, in the interests of their employer’s sport, carried out vulpicide. Farmers and other land occupiers had, of course, a legal right to prohibit hunts from entering their land, either to prevent crop damage caused by careless riders galloping over ploughed fields or by their disturbing game – or because, on principle, they disliked fox-hunting. This latter stance was reinforced from 1924 by the establishment of the League Against Cruel Sports. Such moves earned the bitter scorn of those like Lord Willoughby de Broke, who considered hunting ‘The King of sports and the sport of Kings’, and regarded anyone who opposed it as ‘hardly worth considering. His whole outlook would probably be anti-social and un-English in whatever rank of life he is found.’42 Willoughby de Broke strongly refuted the suggestion that field sports involved the mere killing of animals for pleasure. Such barbarity would have ‘no attraction for a true sportsman, for whom the attraction lies in hunting the game rather than in the killing of it … He is inspired by the instinct of pursuit, the same instinct … that inspires the literary collector in his field … The survival of field sports depends upon the survival of the instinct of pursuit.’43 Such arguments did not persuade the opponents of blood sports, needless to say.
To win over potential opponents, however, hunt committees were urged by their supporters to make every effort to secure the goodwill of the farming community. In January 1927, Country Life warned that hunting ‘in a highly cultivated and much enclosed country like England must depend on the good will of landowners and occupiers, and those who pursue the sport must only go upon the lands
of those whose consent is expressly, or may be assumed to be tacitly given’. A. W. Coaten, The Bystander’s hunting correspondent, also suggested that hunt members should promote good relations by arranging tea parties for farmers and their families or offering inducements, such as clay-pigeon shooting competitions.44 He conceded there were ‘squeamish folk who object to the killing of foxes by hounds’ but argued that if the fox were not killed in that way it would be ‘shot, trapped, dug out, and poisoned, and would have no chance whatever’. By contrast during a hunt there was always the possibility that it would elude its pursuers and live to fight another day. The detailed diary entries covering Lord Winterton’s hunting career suggest that this did happen fairly frequently’.45
Coaten also stressed the economic benefit that hunting bestowed by giving employment to grooms, hunt servants, blacksmiths, saddlers, and other tradespeople. Farmers, in particular, benefited from the sale of fodder. Then, too, houses in hunting districts were let for the season at profitable rents, whereas otherwise they would have been left empty, and that would have increased the local rate burden.46
It was realised after the war that the heavy tax burden and rising costs would inhibit traditional landowners from pursuing the sport as they had once done. Even in December 1918 The Field warned of the effect these restrictions would have on the general finances of hunts, by limiting the number of days that individual members could afford to go out and reducing their subscriptions to the sport. A man who before 1914 had hunted four or five days a week was post-1918 likely to have to reduce his establishment and be content with two days only. ‘The one-horse, one-day man may have to give up his favourite recreation altogether.’47
In practice, the financial problems of the hunts were largely overcome during the 1920s by various means, including increased subscriptions. In addition, there was a greater use of joint-masterships of hunts, so that the costs over and above those met by subscriptions would be covered by more than one wealthy individual.48 Even the famous Beaufort Hunt, although it remained under the control of the young Duke of Beaufort, after he succeeded to the title in 1924, reduced its scale of operations compared to pre-war days. Nonetheless they still began hunting in mid-August and carried on to the first of May, going out six days a week. ‘We would get off very early in the morning – breakfast at six o’clock, because one was out on a horse by half-past six … Every groom had to do two or three horses, and there was a head groom over them, and two or three rather senior ones.’49 It was the Master’s responsibility to arrange the programme and ensure that good sport was shown.
The infusion of new money from members of the nouveau riche who took up the sport also helped with the finances. Among these new members were American socialites like Ronald Tree, who became joint Master of the prestigious Pytchley Hunt in Northamptonshire from 1927 to 1933. Another rich American enthusiast was Mr Strawbridge, a friend of the Prince of Wales, and described in in The Bystander as ‘the Philadelphia millionaire’. He took a house in Melton Mowbray with his wife for a number of years.50 At the end of the 1920s, when subscriptions to the famous Quorn hunt began to fall during the economic depression, Sir Harold Nutting, ‘newly rich from bottling Guinness’, was co-opted into the Mastership. ‘We don’t want your personality, we want your purse,’ joked his joint Master, Algie Burnaby. During the course of the following decade, Jane Ridley suggests that Sir Harold spent ‘around fifteen thousand pounds a year on the Quorn’.5l
A further financial boost was secured by the introduction of ‘capping’ for those who came along for a day’s sport as the whim took them but who were not regular hunt subscribers. Capping involved the payment of a daily fee to the hunt. It was welcomed by A. W. Coaten in The Bystander, when he noted that the North Cotswold Hunt had increased the season’s ‘cap’ for strangers to £2 a day instead of the previous £1:
Nobody should grumble at this increase. In the Shires, where expenses have increased enormously during the past decade, the usual custom is to take £3 per day from those who hunt occasionally with the premier packs. Apart from the fact that it serves as an acceptable source of revenue, the capping system has the agreeable effect … of keeping down the size of the field, thus minimising the danger of damage to the property of the farmers by irresponsible non-subscribers.52
A final influence helping to increase the popularity of hunting was the fact that in 1919 the Prince of Wales started to hunt, mainly in the Shire counties of Leicestershire and Northamptonshire. Between 1923 and 1928 he brought his horses to Craven Lodge, a hunting club in Melton Mowbray, which was the prime centre for the hunting fraternity. The prince was an energetic and sometimes reckless rider and that applied, too, when to his family’s alarm he took part in steeplechases. In 1924 he was so badly concussed after a fall at Arborfield that he was confined to bed for a month. But his enthusiasm was made clear to his close female friend, Mrs Freda Dudley Ward, when in August 1920, during an official tour of Australia, he confided,
This afternoon I rode 6 races & won them all which pleased me because wasn’t always riding the fastest horse … Oh! I’m just crazy about riding races & am more determined than ever to get a chaser & ride in point to points next Spring.53
He wanted to succeed by competing on equal terms with other riders rather than being given precedence merely because he was the Prince of Wales. It seemingly did not occur to him that sometimes his fellow competitors might have allowed him to win because he was the Prince of Wales. Despite family opposition, he continued to hunt and to ride in point to points until his father’s serious illness in 1928 persuaded him to give up. He then turned his attention to golf and gardening, although he remained a subscriber to the Quorn until 1932. During the 1920s, however, his interest in foxhunting, as well as that of his brothers, the dukes of Gloucester, Kent and York, undoubtedly boosted the sport’s social importance.
Inevitably the presence of the Prince of Wales and his entourage made Melton Mowbray the fashionable place for hunting. ‘Houses and hunting-boxes in the town and neighbourhood are letting extraordinarily well,’ declared The Bystander, ‘and the season promises to be a record one – perhaps rather a harassing one for the Masters of the Hunts round Melton Mowbray, because of the number of followers ... In November, when hunting begins, accommodation is at a premium.’54 For many, indeed, hunting had become part of the wider social scene. Hence Patrick Balfour’s acid conclusion that the sport had become ‘so snobbish as to evince very little of the country sense. Melton Mowbray life is not country life’.55 That applied not only to the house parties which were arranged during the season but to other aspects of the entertainment offered. This view is shared by Jane Ridley:
The hunting itself was organised as a social event. The Quorn stopped for lunch, when grooms came up with a change of horse and sandwiches. It was not done to carry a sandwich box or flask on your saddle yourself. The army of second horsemen formed a kind of shadow hunt, led by the hunt staffs’ second horsemen in red, and followed by a cavalcade of grooms in bowlers and black coats, some of them leading side-saddle horses.
Many … were really there for the après chasse. Evenings in Melton were a whirl of cocktails and fancy dress, poker and adultery. Millionaires like ‘Banker’ Lowenstein and Lord Furness wined and dined equestrian socialites … What was ‘vice’ for the Victorians was ‘fun’ in the 1920s … Those who wanted to forget the pain of war sought in hunting a mind-numbing narcotic.56
For younger women the sport might give a purpose to otherwise aimless lives away from London. Katherine, Viscountess Mersey, the elder daughter of the 6th Marquess of Lansdowne, remembered that when the family moved to their country seat, Bowood, in 1927, she ‘went hunting twice a week’ during the winter months. ‘On the other days I had nothing to do at all.’57 Many women also enjoyed the excitement of the chase and a few continued to serve as masters of hunts even when their menfolk returned from the war. Some of the more daring began to ride astride, with cross-saddles becoming acceptable for
ladies during the 1920s. Before 1914 such an innovation would have been considered highly improper. But riding astride was cheaper and more convenient than using a cumbersome and costly side-saddle. Cross-saddles were much lighter, so women could ride smaller and cheaper horses, while their clothing was less expensive, too: ‘well-cut breeches were far less [costly] than [the] riding habits’ worn by those who continued to ride side-saddle, as some still chose to do.58
However, it was a sport which had its dangers, as exemplified by Lady Victoria Bullock, the much-loved daughter of the Earl of Derby. In 1927 she was spending some weeks with Lord and Lady Blandford in Leicestershire, so that she could hunt regularly with the Quorn. In November of that year she had a severe fall in the hunting field and died soon afterwards, without regaining consciousness. A month later her grieving father wrote to his son-in-law, ‘I loved her, as no man has ever loved his daughter, and with her has gone all joy from my life.’59 He never fully recovered from the loss.
Nonetheless, there were those who shared the view of the poet John Masefield when he claimed in the 1920s that ‘hunting brought all ranks of society together on equal terms in a shared venture … during the autumn, winter and early spring of each year, the sport is fox-hunting, which is not like cricket or football, a game for a few and a spectacle for many, but something in which all who come may take a part, whether rich or poor, mounted or on foot’.60 However exaggerated, it was a belief shared by many members of the rural elite.
By contrast, shooting, critics argued, offered none of the wider social and economic benefits that applied to hunting. The labour it employed was limited, with only about 9,000 gamekeepers in England and Wales as a whole in 1921. Even in 1931 that had risen only a little to about 11,000. Thereafter numbers began to fall once more.61 The beaters employed on shoots were often estate workers, diverted from other duties, or those who were hired within the locality for just a few days while shoots were in progress. And whereas hunts attracted large numbers of supporters and followers, shooting parties were limited to the small circle of friends and acquaintances of the landowner or the shooting tenant. Mrs Mildmay White, the daughter of the first Baron Mildmay, who grew up on the Flete estate in Devon, remembered the relatively small shooting parties who came to her home. These commenced each November:
