Swans in the moat, inglenooks and romantic conservatism … but Adrian Tinswood’s hugely enjoyable, unsnobbish book uncovers another, more subversive, side to the story
The problem with breaking down the past into periods is that it requires you to come up with a signature for each artificial parcel of time. In terms of the English country house, which is the subject of Adrian Tinniswood’s hugely enjoyable new book, that would mean the chilly Victorians (windows open all the time, no central heating, one lavatory for everyone) giving way to the luxurious Edwardians (hot, running water, eight courses for dinner) leading to – what exactly, for the interwar period? A rough sketch might start in 1918 with empty seats at the breakfast table, a reminder of all those young lives lost in the Flanders mud. Then you’d have the roaring 1920s, with flappers doing the Charleston on ancient flagstones, cheered on by some prince of the blood with a showgirl on one arm, a handsome chauffeur on the other and a Benzedrine cocktail within easy reach. Then it would be the early 30s, with everyone having gloomy conversations with their land agent about selling off the home farm, before we get to the eve of another war with much muttering that peace with the Hun doesn’t seem too awful a price to pay if it means you can hang on to your Saturday-to-Mondays in the Quantocks.
But as Tinniswood shows, life behind the mullioned windows and Palladian pillars during those 21 years was infinitely more varied than this frictionless summary suggests. As well as swans in the moat, inglenooks and romantic conservatism, there was decay, streamlined modernism and queer subversion. It is a story – or a space – that contains red-cheeked squires and American plutocrats, Mrs Miniver and Mrs Simpson, Winston Churchill and Charlie Chaplin, earls in plus fours and Cecil Beaton in drag. In short, it is life itself, fretful and funny, deft and daft.
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