The Chronicles of Country Houses

Adrian Tinniswood is an author and historian, well known for his popular books which combine anecdote and the sort of history writing that transports you through time. He talked to Sarah Greenwood about his career and his love of the British Country House.

I’ve seen you described as a chronicler of country houses and as a social historian. How do you describe yourself?

I think of myself as a historian but I make a living as an author, although I also run the University of Buckingham’s postgraduate country house studies programme.

Where did you first fall in love with history?

I graduated in English and Philosophy without much idea of what to do next, then I got a temporary job at the National Trust’s Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire. As a child, I was taken to Haddon and Hardwick and Chatsworth by my parents, but Sudbury was the first house where I could go through a door marked Private. It just clicked.

From Sudbury, I went on to research country house guidebooks, then to Somerset in the early 1980s with John Hodgson, who was a pioneer of heritage education and the National Trust’s first Education Adviser. I started writing children’s guides to National Trust houses. We found out quite early on that if you are creative in your approach, the adults join in too.

Did you stay with heritage education?

I was Heritage Education Editor with the National Trust right through until the late 1990s, but I’d read Pride and Prejudice and was intrigued at the way that Elizabeth Bennett’s aunt and uncle take her around Pemberley. The idea that Pemberley was open to the public in the early 19th century, when I thought it was new, swept me up. So, my first book was The Polite Tourist, looking at 500 years of country house visiting.

Why are you interested, not in architecture, but in people in country houses?

One of the pivotal moments in the history of the country house in the 20th century was the publication of Mark Girouard’s Life in the English Country House in 1978. At Sudbury, people started asking “Where did the servants sleep?” when they were supposed to be interested in the pictures and the plasterwork, not in the people. Girouard encouraged us to think in a different way about the social structures in a country house, and his book was a best-seller. Two years later, the Granada adaptation of Brideshead Revisited encouraged the cult of the country house. In Nottingham, I taught adult education classes and I found that if you put the phrase ‘Country Houses’ in the course title, you filled it. I remember talking in miners’ villages in North Nottinghamshire with 60 people in the room and having to run two courses back-to-back because there was such a waiting list. Everybody wanted to know about country houses then.

What happened to the “cult of the country house”? Do we still love them?

It’s cyclical, I think. My sense is that the country house is in a very good place at the moment. Interest is returning, it dipped in the 2000s - maybe people got just a little bit bored. Now the emphasis on the social history of the country house is the norm and I find myself having to remind people that the reason we keep these places is that they are just so beautiful. They are not history lessons, they are not there to teach us anything, they are there to admire. Step into Mount Stewart or Castle Drogo or Petworth and your heart does a leap because it is still such a wonderful experience.

What other changes have there been in people’s interest?

Over the past couple of years, there have been ‘heritage wars’ within the National Trust membership, rather savage attacks on the National Trust by left and right. My view is that if both sides hate it, they must be doing something right. The recent talk about slavery and colonialism has been seen, quite wrongly, as a threat to our understanding of the country house. At the same time we shouldn’t force people to see country houses in certain ways, either as pickled in aspic or as BLM social documents. They are all of these things, let people take what they want from them.

In your recent books you look at the country house in the 20th century, what have you learned?

After spending a long time in the 17th century, writing about Christopher Wren, Barbary Pirates, the Verneys and the Great Fire of London, I moved into the 20th century about 5 years ago, blinking into the sunlight. The Long Weekend was about the country house between the wars and my most recent book, Noble Ambitions is about the post-war country house. What I have found is that there are parallel narratives about the country house in the 20th century. The conventional narrative is about destruction, demolition and decay which feeds into the notion of the country house owner as victim. While there is truth in that, there is another narrative about dynamism and creativity. The country house after the war has been a very exciting place; it’s not all gloom and doom.

What fundamental changes were there to the country house in the 20th century?

The loss of contact with community is one of the important changes of the 20th century. The almost feudal connection between country house owner and the community has gone, I think. When I was at Sudbury, the 10th Lord Vernon still owned most of the village. As a young Marxist fi rebrand, I thought this was disgraceful but the paradox was that it was a thriving relationship that the villagers actively welcomed.

You talk about rock star fortunes in the 1960s in your book ‘Noble Ambitions’. Has there always been new money?

We tend to regard new people – an internet entrepreneur or a celebrity – buying a country house as a bad thing but new money has saved the country house over and over again.

Why do you think that “the country house is doing all right these days”?

In the long view, the legislative framework which came after the Gowers Report in the 1950s, means that it is quite diffi cult to knock down a country house today. By and large, country houses are protected now in a way they weren’t in the 1920s and 1930s. As important, the diversity of income streams that many have developed means that they are better placed fi nancially. And, taking the long view, the art market has grown so rapidly that if you have to fl og a painting, you get enough for it to keep things going for a lot longer than in the 1920s or 1930s.

You devote the early pages of your books to scene setting – conveying the reader back in time – do you enjoy writing those bits?

Yes, and I love gossip. There is more gossip attached to the country house than most other areas of life and I want to take my reader there to understand what it was like. The scene I always picture is when the Duke of Devonshire was struggling with death duties in the 1950s. He turns to the Duchess and explains, “I don’t think we will ever be able to live here - but I don’t want to be the one to let it go”. That is a very powerful emotion.

You’ve also written about Life in the English Country Cottage, but do the best stories come from the aristocracy?

I just love the country house and how it functions. Because of that I’m endlessly fascinated by the people that lived in them. That’s not just the aristocracy, it might be new money or below stairs and the social structures.

You’ve covered pirates, merchants, kings and queens and rock stars? What’s next?

I want to write a prequel to The Long Weekend about the late Victorian and Edwardian country house. I want to focus on outsiders and how they were or weren’t accepted into society. Particulary around 1900 when the Prince of Wales’ Marlborough House set was at its most cosmopolitan, and including people like Duleep Singh, the last Maharajah of the Sikh Empire, at Elveden Hall or American sewing machine king, Isaac Singer, at Oldway Mansions.

You have one afternoon before leaving for your desert island - where would you go?

I change this answer all the time. The house I used to love most was Cardiff Castle with its fantastic William Burges interiors. More recently, I fell in love again with Castle Drogo and Lutyens at his most castellated. Just now it will have to be Hinton Ampner in Hampshire - 1960s neoneo-Georgian, and exactly the kind of house I’d like to live in.