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Presidential Address: English Landed Society in the Twentieth Century: I, Property: Collapse and Survival

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

F. M. L. Thompson
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Extract

The death rattle of the landed order, like the death knell of capitalism, has been clearly heard dozens of times over the last hundred years and more. Yet there is a suspicion that the sounds have been mis-heard misinterpreted, for collapse and decomposition have never followed the symptoms of sickness and crisis. The Churchill family have played their part in crying ‘wolf’. In 1885 the 8th Duke of Marlborough, reflecting on ‘the organised agitation against the present ownership of land’, asserted that ‘were there any effective demand for the purchase of land, half the land of England would be in the market tomorrow’. He had inside information, the Blenheim estate being heavily indebted. A generation later his son, the 9th Duke, having helped stave off disaster by marrying Consuelo Vanderbilt, wrote in his turn to The Times. Under the heading ‘Old Order Doomed’ and the shock of the 1919 Budget, with its ‘confiscatory’ increase in death duties to a rate of 40 per cent on estates of £2 million and over, he stated that ‘[the] fortresses of territorial influence it is proposed to raze in the name of social equality’ and forecast that ‘the new tax must make it impossible for the heirs of these men—[the landed magnates]—to carry on the tradition’. Whether the heirs have carried on the tradition is debatable, but it is indisputable that in 1989 his grandson, now the 11 th Duke, is still seated in Blenheim Palace, surrounded by an estate of 11,500 acres. That may be no more than half the acreage owned by his great-grandfather but it is nevertheless a very large estate, and a principal reason for placing the IIth Duke among the 200 wealthiest people in Britain.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 40 , December 1990 , pp. 1 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1990

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References

1 Letter to The Times, 8th Duke of Marlborough, 3 Oct. 1885.

2 Letter to The Times, 9th Duke of Marlborough, 19 May 1919.

3 Sunday Times Supplement: Britain's Rich, The Top 200, 2 April 1989, 62. The data in this guide are undoubtedly not entirely reliable, but the size of the Marlborough estate is corroborated in Perrott, R., The Aristocrats: A Portrait of Britain's Nobility and their Way of Life Today (1968), 153Google Scholar.

4 Churchill, W. S., Liberalism and the Social Problem (1909), 329–30Google Scholar.

5 Rates of death duties are most easily accessible in Whitaker's Almanack (various editions), normally under the heading ‘Estate Duty’.

6 Colville, J., The Fringes of Power. Downing Street Diaries, 1939–55 (1985), 474Google Scholar, quoted by Beard, M., English Landed Society in the Twentieth Century (1989), 86Google Scholar.

7 Whitaker's Almanack (1911 edn.).

8 Whitaker's Almanack (1973 and 1988 edns.).

9 Whitaker's Almanack (1973 edn.).

10 Dunbabin, J. P. D., ‘Expectations of the new County Councils, and their realization’, Historical Journal, viii (1965)Google Scholar; Olney, R.J., Rural Society and County Government in Nineteenth-Century Lincolnshire (Lincoln, 1979), 135–40Google Scholar.

11 Summarised by Clemenson, Heather A., English Country Houses and Landed Estates (1982), 212–15Google Scholar. See also Beard, , English Landed Society, 119–21Google Scholar, or Perrott, Aristocrats, chap. 1, for statements of the pessimistic position on aristocratic decline.

12 Montgomery, Maureen E., Gilded Prostitution: Status, money, and transatlantic marriages, 1870–1914 (1989), Tables 5.1 and 5.2, 89–91Google Scholar. See also Thompson, F. M. L., ‘Aristocracy, Gentry, and the Middle Classes in Britain, 1750–1850,’ in Birke, Adolf M. and Kettenacker, Lothar, eds., Burgertum, Adel und Monarchie (Munich, 1989), Appendix 1, 33Google Scholar.

13 Who's Who (1975 edn.) and Burke's Peerage (1970 edn.).

14 Who's Who (1975 edn.) and Burke's Peerage (1970 edn.), sample of all peers with pre-1900 titles under letters A, B, C, and S: there were 179 peers in this group, roughly a quarter of the total peerage of pre-1900 creations. Of these, 16 were unmarried; the 163 who had ever married had contracted 227 marriages.

15 Scott, J., The Upper Classes: Property and Privilege in Britain (1982)Google Scholar: from 1914 the ‘landed aristocracy’ ceases to be used as a distinct socio-political category, and is replaced by ‘the business classes’; see especially chap. 7.

16 Whetham, Edith H., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, VIII, 1914–1939 (Cambridge, 1978), 139–41Google Scholar.

17 Burke's Landed Gentry (1952 edn.), Preface (by Pine, L. G.), xviiGoogle Scholar.

18 Thompson, F. M. L., English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (1963), 28–9, 56–62Google Scholar. Bateman, J., The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland (1878 edn.), 463–71Google Scholar. (1883 edn.), 499–500.

19 Perrott, , Aristocrats, 182Google Scholar.

20 The Times, 24 Sept. 1910, 8. Long also claimed that ‘those of us who did not possess other sources of income’ are obliged to sell land. This was mendacious: he was a director of the Great Western Railway and chairman of Bath Breweries, and owned property in Canada.

21 The Times, 4 Jan. 1919, II; Estates Gazette, 4 Jan. 1919, 10. The price realised on the sale of 137,342 acres in 1919, £1.46 an acre, was not as derisory as it seems, since it amounted to about 30 years' purchase.

22 Clemenson, Landed Estates; her findings are summarised in Tables 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3, 119–22.

23 Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth, Report No. 7, July 1979 [Cmnd. 7595, 1979–80], 6.26–6.28, 152.

24 Bateman, , Great Landowners (1883 edn.), 515Google Scholar. Norton, , Trist, and Gilbert, , ‘A Century of Land Values: England and Wales’ (1889)Google Scholar, reprinted in E. M. Carus-Wilson, ed., Essays in Economic History, III (1962), 128. Bateman, , Great Landowners (1878 edn.), 472Google Scholar, produced a table of ‘the distribution of the area of the United Kingdom among the great landowners themselves, divided into six classes.’ There was a total of 2,512 owners of estates of over 3,000 acres; in Class VI, the holders of between 3,000 and 6,000 acres there were 1,014 owners. There were thus 1,498 holders of estates of over 6,000 acres in the U.K. The ratio of holders of all estates of over 3,000 acres, U.K.: England and Wales, was 2,512: 1,688, and at the same ratio there would have been 1,003 holders of estates of over 6,000 acres in England and Wales alone.

25 R.C. Distribution of Income and Wealth, 6.26, 152, citing McEwan, J., Who Owns Scotland? (Edinburgh, 1977)Google Scholar. Scottish estates of 3,000acres and upwards, in the 1880s, have been counted from individual entries in Bateman, , Great Landowners (1878 edn.)Google Scholar. By excluding the essentially English (and a very few Welsh and Irish) landowners who chanced to own a handful of acres in Scotland, but including the more seriously Anglo-Scottish landowners who had large estates in each country, this total is smaller than the 491 great landowners who were noted by Bateman as having some land in Scotland (he listed 375 as having their estates solely in Scotland), 473.

26 Bateman, , Great Landowners (1878 edn.), 476–7Google Scholar. It was nevertheless asserted in 1958 that in spite of the small size and greatly reduced numbers of surviving estates, enough of the Old Ascendancy gentry remained to make a society of their own ‘as much divorced from the governing class as is the old noblesse in France’: Preface toBurke's Irish Landed Gentry (1958 edn.), xix–xxi.

27 Out of a large literature on pre-1914 land reform and land tax matters much the best discussion, theoretical and empirical, is in Offer, Avner, Property and Politics, 1870–1914 (Cambridge, 1981), especially chaps. 16, 19, and 22Google Scholar. See also, Thompson, F. M. L., ‘Land and politics in England in the nineteenth century’, ante, xv (1965)Google Scholar; Douglas, R., Land, People, and Politics: A History of the Land Question in the United Kingdom, 1878–1952 (1976)Google Scholar. For a latter-day land-taxer see Hall, Peter, London 2001 (1989), 190–6Google Scholar.

28 Cited in Thompson, , Landed Society, 330–2Google Scholar.

29 Kenworthy, J. M. [Lord Strabolgi], Sailors, Statesmen and Others (1933), 48–9Google Scholar, cited by Cannadine, D., The Decline of the British Landed Establishment (forthcoming, 1990)Google Scholar.

30 Burke's Landed Gentry (1937 edn.), Preface, xv, xxiii.

31 Judd, G. R., ‘Capital taxation and the farmer’ Estates Gazette, 5 04 1975, 35Google Scholar; , C. L. A.The Future of Landownership (1976), 8Google Scholar: cited by Clemenson, , Landed Estates, 114, 213Google Scholar.

32 Estates Gazette, 22 Oct. 1932, 592; 9 Nov. 1957, 603.

33 Estates Gazette, 11 Jan. 1930, 46; 1 Aug. 1953, 129. Burke's Peerage (1959 edn.), Who was Who, VI, 1961–1970Google Scholar.

34 Perrott, , Aristocrats, 153, 154Google Scholar. Estates Gazette, 1 Jan. 1921, 31 Dec. 1921, 8 Jan. 1936, 225. Burke's Peerage (1959 edn.).

35 Burke's Peerage (1970 edn.). Guide to Burghley House (Stamford, 1989)Google Scholar. Ex inf. Julian Michael Byng, Wrotham Park.

36 Burke's Landed Gentry (1937 edn.), Arkwright, and Bevan, Google Scholar; vol. III (1972 edn.), Preface, ix.

37 Strong, Roy, Binney, Marcus, and Harris, John, eds., The Destruction of the Country House (1974), especially 15–100, 188–92Google Scholar.

38 Robinson, J. M., The Latest Country Houses (1984), 136–42Google Scholar.

39 Robinson, , Country Houses, 6, 197–234Google Scholar.

40 Sunday Times, Britain's Rich, 40, claimed he is ‘Europe's largest private landowner.’

41 Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Acquisition and Occupancy of Agricultural Land [the Northfield Report] [Cmnd. 7599, 1979], 92–7.

42 The Times, 12 March 1951, 4; 17 Nov. 1951, 8; 27 Feb. 1963, 6; 2 March 1963, 5; 6 March 1963, 6; 15 March 1963, 7; 3 May 1963, 14; 9 May 1963, 7; 15 May 1963, 8.