MADE IN THE SHADE

From wide-brimmed floppy numbers to finely crafted Panamas, straw hats are a mainstay of any summer wardrobe. Tamsin Blanchard traces the stylish history of this race-day staple

Summer is the moment when many of us succumb to the allure of a shady straw brim. Sun-dappled picnics, midsummer weddings, a day at the races… a summer hat is surely the perfect seasonal accomplice. The easiest thing is simply to dust off last year’s number from the top of the cupboard. After all, the neat bucket hat, the favourite sunbleached sombrero, that trusty Panama or the boater that reminds you of schooldays – they never really get old.

But, as is often the way with fashion, sometimes things can go to extremes. Over the past few years, the sunhat has become quite the statement piece, a sure way to grab attention with minimal effort. Imagine the biggest brim aerodynamically possible. Then supersize it. And add just a few more centimetres for good measure. With global warming, it seems, you can’t be too careful. According to the cultish French fashion house Jacquemus, as long as there’s not too much of a breeze, no one should step out into the midday sun in anything but a total body blocker – a hat so vast you could almost wear it as a poncho. The brand’s show-stopping Le Chapeau Bomba has a brim of raffia 35cm deep (you’ll just about fit through the average doorway) and caused a sensation when it was unveiled on the runway for spring/summer 2018.

While the Bomba filled the frames (literally) of many an influencer’s Instagram feed, the humongous hat already had form. Brigitte Bardot set the trend for the 1950s with her penchant for an oversized straw. Not that she needed any help in making a grand entrance on La Croisette. She also helped to popularise the boater (showing that you don’t need a boat, or even a gondola, to wear one) and the cloche hat, shaped as the name suggests, like a bell. Miraculously, any shape, style or size of hat seemed to suit, making Bardot the ultimate go-to for straw hat inspiration.

Audrey Hepburn was the same. She could wear a plant pot-shaped bonnet and still look cool. Her depiction of Holly Golightly in the wide brim, pearls and dark sunglasses is still the perfect hangover cure for any party girl. The only other person who comes close is Bianca Jagger, whose effortlessly cool floppy straw hat usurped the traditional lace veil when she married Mick Jagger in Saint-Tropez in 1971.

But perhaps the ultimate straw hat is not the biggest but the most finely crafted. A Panama hat woven from the finest tequila palm straw in its native Montecristi in Ecuador can take up to eight months to make by a master artisan. In 2012 the craft was put on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list to protect it and preserve it for future generations. The term Panama refers not to the style but the softest, most finely woven straw which is meticulously smoothed and shaped to make the classic fedora (creased down the middle and pinched at the sides) or a range of other shapes. The resulting hat – as sported by stylish racegoers at Goodwood since the Edwardian era – is so supple it can be rolled, a little like a fine cigar, making it the most practical of travelling companions. Panama aficionados claim that a really fine hat can be rolled up and passed through a wedding ring. The finer the weave, the higher the protection from the sun, and the higher the price tag: those 19th-century gold-prospectors knew quality when they saw it. A hat this good (and versatile – a Panama comes in a whole range of styles including a visor for tennis games) will last forever and is worth its weight in gold.

REVISITED

For more than a century, the Dukes of Richmond and Gordon divided their time between Goodwood and the magnificent Gordon Castle in Moray. James Collard delves into the Gordon Lennox family albums to reveal the fascinating history of the Scottish connection

“Lying on your tummy and tickling trout at Glenfiddich! Could anything delight a child more? The smell of peat fires… the roar of the red deer in October… those enchanting days when we spent long hours among the heather in the keen fresh air.” When I Remember, the memoirs of Lady Muriel Beckwith, published in 1936, powerfully evoke her childhood as a young Gordon Lennox, growing up at Gordon Castle in Scotland and Goodwood in Sussex. But somehow it is her Scottish memories that shine through more vividly.

Perhaps that’s understandable, given that the family’s visits to Scotland – a vast undertaking involving the packing of multiple trunks and the hiring of a private train carriage from Euston – would have felt like a holiday, taken annually, immediately after the social crescendo of Race Week at Goodwood, and spent in a romantic old building surrounded by fine scenery. In time, for Muriel and the other Gordon Lennox brood, childhood pleasures like trout trickling would give way to grown-up sports such as landing her first salmon (“the most thrilling day of my life”) which in the un-squeamish vocabulary of her era, one “killed” rather than caught. This was one of the great sporting estates, after all, with fishing on the River Spey and deer-stalking and grouse-shooting to be enjoyed from lodges nearby in Glenfiddich and Blackwater. Later still, as this was the Edwardian heyday of country house life, came the yet more grown-up pleasures of house parties, which the Gordon Lennox family hosted in some style at Gordon Castle and Glenfiddich, just as they did at Goodwood.

This combination of life at Goodwood and Gordon Castle lasted more than a century – from 1836, when the 5th Duke of Gordon died without a legitimate male heir, leaving most of his Scottish estates to his nephew, Charles, 6th Duke of Richmond – until 1938, when death duties forced Charles’s great-grandson to sell up in Scotland. The Gordons had been a major Scottish clan with vast lands. Its chiefs were leading Scottish nobles who first built their castle on the banks of the River Spey (near Fochabers in Moray) in the 15th century, and by the 1800s it was effectively a palace, and the largest house in Scotland.

The 6th Duke promptly recognised the importance of his Scottish inheritance by changing the family name to Gordon Lennox. In her memoirs, however – written just before the Scottish connection came to an end – Lady Muriel often seems more Gordon than Lennox. She describes the thrill she felt, “every time I board a train for Scotland, for I know that I am going back to my heritage. Not of land and castles or of anything material, but of my Gordon blood, which runs more strongly in my veins than any of the other contributory streams.”

But the family’s Scottish connection goes back much further than that 1789 marriage of a Gordon and a Lennox. It begins right at the start of the dynasty, shortly after the birth in 1672 of Charles – an illegitimate son of King Charles II and his French mistress, Louise de Kérouaille. A great-grandson of King James I of England and VI of Scotland, young Charles could not be made a legitimate royal prince and heir. But his royal Stuart lineage was emphasised when King Charles made him Duke of Richmond and Lennox – the English and Scottish titles previously held by a cadet branch of the Stuarts. Louise’s French patron, Louis XIV, also presented Louise and her heirs with the French title of Duke of Aubigny, along with a chateau in the central French province of Berry, both of which had once belonged to Sir John Stewart, a scion of Scotland’s royal house who had fought with the French against the English.

So far, so very Scottish. But for the first few Dukes of Richmond, the French connection would have felt more tangible than any Scottish one, with the French chateau remaining in the family until 1842, when the 5th Duke finally sold it, just a few years after coming into the vast Gordon inheritance. And to understand the scale of this Scottish legacy, it is worth noting that in the second half of the 19th century, when the Dukes of Richmond were the fourth-largest landowners in the United Kingdom, of their 289,000 acres of land, a little less than 20,000 acres were at Goodwood. The rest was all north of the border.

Added to this, in 1876 Queen Victoria revived the old Gordon title for Lady Charlotte Gordon’s grandson – which is why Charles, the current Duke of Richmond and Gordon, is in the singular position of being a duke three times over (or four times if one includes that old French title). Victoria’s move was partly a mark of their great friendship, partly a mark of respect, as this most political of dukes of Richmond had just stepped down as Leader of the House of Lords. But the Queen also sought to cement his role in Scotland as the custodian of the Gordon heritage. It wasn’t right, the Queen wrote, “that when these great possessions pass into English hands, they should be treated as a secondary possession and in some cases… like a shoot place. By conferring this great title on the D of Richmond it will once again do away with this and have the very best effect.” In fact, the Duke was anything but an absentee landlord of his Scottish estates, keenly identifying with the interests of his tenants and sometimes being criticised for the length of time he spent on his sprawling Speyside estate rather than at Westminster.

Throughout the 19th century the family’s Gordon inheritance neatly dovetailed with the English romance for all things Scottish, and the indomitable mother of Lady Charlotte Lennox, née Gordon – Jane Maxwell, Duchess of Gordon – played a major role in this. A woman of astonishing energy and charm, she’d grown up as rather a wild child in Edinburgh, losing a finger in a prank when she had ridden a pig through the city traffic, before marrying the great catch that was the 4th Duke of Gordon. A friend and supporter of Robert Burns, in the 1780s Jane also launched the craze for wearing tartan and dancing Scottish reels among London high society, where she was a leading hostess. And the reels danced by the Gordon Highlanders at the ball held by her daughter, Lady Richmond, in Brussels in 1815 – shortly before they marched into battle, many to their deaths – would go down in history as a key part of the Waterloo narrative.

Scotland’s romantic appeal in the 19th century was a heady mix of kilts and Walter Scott’s tales of Jacobite rebels, of noble stags in the glens and of course the epic beauty of the Highlands themselves, with which Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were so smitten that they built Balmoral Castle there in the 1850s. Much of this feeling was nostalgic, but the living tug of a salmon on the line or the flutter of a grouse in one’s sights attracted many in an era when blood sports were enjoyed without a qualm. And nostalgia aside, it was the new railways, greatly facilitating travel to and from Scotland, that allowed for those annual Gordon Lennox peregrinations.

“Here a great landowner might become a simple gentleman,” Lady Muriel wrote of the way her grandfather enjoyed life on his Scottish estates, and her memoirs capture the mix of grandeur and informality that characterised house parties at the castle. Dinners might be served in splendid state, but she describes the much-loved (and messy) ritual of guests at fishing parties making their own picnic lunches every morning from a table groaning with hams, pâtés and buns. Then there was the “Shankery”, presided over by head gillie and family favourite, Geordie Shanks (“the dearest old man of his day”), where rods were doled out and salmon weighed –and toffee made by Geordie at the roaring fire for the children when the weather was too bleak for fishing.

By no means did the 6th Duke treat his Scottish estates merely as “a shoot place”, however. A paternalistic landlord “akin to a great Scottish chieftain”, he spent the considerable sum of £200,000 on improvements to local housing and the like, while sacrificing more than twice that by forgoing tenants’ rents during the hard times of the late Victorian era. Small wonder that when he died at the castle in 1903, he was deeply mourned. “As one clan they gathered,” the memoirist recalls, before being taken one last time by train down to Sussex, “coming from all parts of the country… fishermen from the Moray Firth, crofters from the highlands, salmon fishermen from the Spey, and Glenfiddich gamekeepers… people from high places and simple Highland tenants, until the gardens were black with the concourse of mourners”.

But this way of life wasn’t to last. Just over a decade after the Duke’s death came the Great War – when the castle became a hospital for convalescing soldiers – and then with peace came that gradual paring back that presaged the end of the country house life of house parties and the near-feudal noblesse oblige which the 6th Duke had personified so completely. It is a story repeated across Britain – indeed across Europe, where in the first half of the 20th century aristocrats lost great estates (and sometimes their lives) to revolution, war and an epochal shift in economic and social power. At Gordon Castle this wasn’t a sudden thing – more a steady diminution, as becomes clear when one reads the newspapers of the era.

Throughout the Edwardian years the reports are mostly social – a local newspaper looking forward to a visit of the Prince of Wales or a season of “exceptional activity” at the castle, hosted by the 7th Duke and his “youthful hostess” (his daughter Caroline), followed during wartime by articles about soldiers convalescing in the auxiliary hospital in the castle (where Lady Muriel worked as a nurse) or fundraising bazaars in the grounds. But in 1930, under the recently elevated 8th Duke, a local paper reported the despatch of books from the castle’s library for sale at Sotheby’s. Then, early in 1938, as Freddie, the 9th Duke, dealt with the impact of double death duties, the highland games held annually in the grounds were cancelled, “owing to the altered circumstances connected with the venue”. And then later that year, under the headline “Gordon Castle Treasures”, the Aberdeen Press & Journal reported the sale of the castle’s contents, “which with the whole of the estate lands, has been acquired by the Crown”.

The loss of the castle must have been a massive wrench –felt keenly both by the Gordon Lennox family and the communities around them. The severance of ties with the family wouldn’t be complete, the report went on to say, as the dowager Duchess was building a cottage nearby, while for now the family held on to the lodge at Glenfiddich (its sale would appear as a sad coda to the story in 1946). But with the sale, as

Left: ladies picnicking in the 1880s, including Lady Caroline and Lady Violet Gordon Lennox and friends

James Peill, the former curator at Goodwood has written, “Over just five days, nearly five hundred years’ worth of collecting was dispersed.” And an era came to an end.

The painful decision to part with the Scottish inheritance had been made by Freddie after a prolonged period of soulsearching. Struggling with large debts – but mindful of both family opinion and the judgement of posterity – he recorded his reasoning in a thoughtful and cogent memo. But the mathematics facing him were clear: with £170,000 owed in death duties and £250,000 in mortgages – and with an annual income from the Scottish estates of just under £5,000 – he had little hope of paying off his debts without selling the castle and estates, which he did, to the Crown Office, for £525,000.

Perhaps Freddie felt he might be able to save Goodwood or Gordon Castle – but not both. The palatial house the 4th and 5th Dukes of Gordon had built around the castle’s ancient tower had seemed very large when they built it in the first half of 19th century, incurring major debts in the process, but it was preposterously large for aristocratic life as lived in the mid-20th century, when country houses throughout the nation were being sold, knocked down or turned into schools.

What’s more, Freddie was in many ways a different kind of duke to his forebears – more interested in cars and planes than horses or blood sports. “While we (my Father, Mother, Sisters and Brother) did our best with rod and gun,” he wrote, “the fun of the sport was greatly marred by the ridiculous aspect put upon it all. The fishing was talked of with a reverence few display before the altar and the Spey looked upon as Buddha.” Freddie would delay the sale of Gordon Castle, in part to be certain he wasn’t allowing his own sensibilities to dictate a decision of such lasting import for his family, heirs and the people living and working on Gordon lands. But as a young man Freddie had left Goodwood to train as a mechanic at Bentley, calling himself Mr Settrington (after the courtesy title held by the grandson and heir to the Dukes of Richmond); and he’d married a vicar’s daughter, both decisions meeting stiff opposition from his parents – waged most fiercely by his mother, Duchess Hilda. Born into the Brassey family, whose fortune had been made by her grandfather, Thomas Brassey, an engineering contractor who built many of Britain’s networks of new railways, Hilda nonetheless had firm opinions on how the heir to three dukedoms should live his life.

Perhaps it is fanciful to paraphrase Lady Muriel and wonder if the blood of his Brassey great-grandfather – quick, enterprising, practical – flowed more thickly in Freddie’s veins. His Gordon Lennox ancestors included plenty of innovators. But Freddie was definitely a man of his time: an entrepreneur who was passionate in his pursuit of automotive and aviation excellence rather than country pursuits. And it would be Freddie who, in 1948, just three years after Evelyn Waugh lamented the end of the aristocratic country house life in Brideshead Revisited, combined his love of fast cars with the stewardship of Goodwood by bringing motor-racing to the estate, ultimately giving it a whole new lease of life.

Today his grandson, the current Duke of Richmond and Gordon, presides over Goodwood, which regularly hosts hundreds of thousands of visitors on a scale that would have amazed his hospitable forebears, while the Duke’s cousin, Angus Gordon Lennox, is custodian of Gordon Castle. After World War II, the castle was bought by Lt Gen Sir George Gordon Lennox, a grandson of the 7th Duke. And although diminished in size from the vast pile it was in its heyday, today it flourishes as a modern sporting estate and exclusive-use venue, while its huge, carefully restored walled garden is a new focus for visitors. Not quite what the Gordons had in mind when they first built their Speyside tower, perhaps, but they would surely be pleased to learn that the house they built turned out, against the odds, to be a survivor.

Previous pages: Gordon Lennox family and guests (and much-loved gillie Geordie Shanks in the black bowler hat) enjoy country pursuits.

Below: Highland games at the castle. Right: the salon, with Pompeo Batoni’s portrait of the 4th Duke of Gordon

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