Great halls, last balls

Contrary to popular myth, the exuberant flame of life in the English country house was not extinguished by tears at the end of the Great War. And in his deliciously jaunty and wonderfully knowledgeable book, Adrian Tinniswood, social historian and country house authority, also upturns the story that huge numbers of Britain’s loveliest houses disappeared in the 1920s and 1930s, either through lack of heirs, despair, neglect or the stranglehold of taxation. He describes how instead, with ‘new aesthetics and new social structures’, the clubby, elitist, joyful prewar way of life adapted and became even more vibrant after the Armistice.

In part, the yearning for a sense of rootedness had become more urgent than ever. ‘The country house was a home, and more — something woven into the fabric of society,’ Tinniswood explains. When flesh and blood had proved so fragile, bricks, mortar and heraldic cornices offered ‘a symbol of continuity which held out the hope of a return to normality after the slaughter’. In a series of super-generously illustrated chapters Tinniswood displays a terrific insider’s grasp of gossip, while cramming his text with the stories of sport, sex, food, royalty, design, ruination and joy that defined these mansions.

During the interwar period of ‘gentle decline’ — ‘the long weekend’ — it is certainly true that several of Britain’s most splendid manor houses, their owners taxed beyond their means, were lost forever. Sutton Scarsdale, the grandest Georgian house in Derbyshire, sunk roofless to the ground. Others were demolished, or taken down beam by beam, like the glorious timber-framed Lymore Hall near Montgomery. The building had become so precarious that during a church fête the Earl of Powis, accompanied by 20 parishioners, suddenly plunged through the rotting floorboards of the Great Hall into the cellar below. Having found no takers for his offer to rent out the place at just £1 a year, Lymore’s distraught Earl could not face attending the auction at which his house was bodily stripped of all its finery.