Clouds, The East Front, 1904

David Cannadine in The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy takes the long view of the matter, beginning in the 1880s with the Reform Bills and pursuing the matter all the way into the grisly details of the post-war years.  You know, however, that I prefer to focus on that one happy and important Camelot-like year, 1904, when, although it was essentially over and the train had left the station and the milkman had come and gone (as my father liked to say), it didn't yet quite feel like the end. 

My dear friend Lisa used to say her favorite part of a date was getting ready for it, taking a bath and deciding what to wear, the actual experience inevitably being something of a let down.  I on the other hand, as you might guess, prefer the moment right before the end -- not the very end itself, of course, but that exquisite sensation right before you know it's going to be over, and you know it's going to be over very shortly, and the next thing you'll be doing is feeling hungry or lighting a cigarette and changing the subject, (having quit smoking I speak metaphorically), but in that brief thrilling instant, at the top of the roller-coaster before it makes the plunge, on top of  the world, you are terribly happy and want to live forever.  And that is what I'm talking about with 1904.  I hope this explanation helps. 

 Clouds, part of the Dining Room, 1904

Mr. Cannadine views the approach to the end in a rather different way, as I've said, looking at various statistics like country house expenditures:  "Between 1835 and 1874, traditional landowners had been responsible for well over half of the mansions that were built; but from 1875 to 1914, they commissioned fewer than one fifth; and by the inter-war years, the figure was even lower" (p. 100-101). He mentions a few of the landed gentry who engaged in remodeling or enlarging schemes, including the Duke of Portland at Welbeck, and then goes on to point out that well before 1914, "completely new mansions were extremely rare: only Bryanston for the Portmans and Clouds for the Hon. Percy Wyndham stand out."

 Part of the West Front

Of course, as Cannadine admits, Lutyens in architecture and Sargent and de Lazlo in painting and portraiture would continue a sometimes brisk business up to and after the first War, supported in increasingly large measure by a new class of clients; however, the historian is focused on the dispersal of the land and the subsequent demise of the power and control of the state by those who owned that land.

Whereas I can only think of those country houses as they were and must have been in 1904, especially knowing what would become of them.  Designed by Philip Webb for Percy and Madeline Wyndham, Clouds, is now a drug rehab center.  Celebrities like Robbie Williams and Pete Doherty (with his special visitor Courtney Love) walk the halls and gardens where once Lady Elcho dallied with the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt.  

Meanwhile, the palatial Victorian house designed by Norman Shaw for the second Lord Portman, Bryanston Hall (see Here) is now a school.  Death duties in 1919 ruined the Portmans; these days "six junior boys sleep in the state bedroom where Edward VII and Queen Alexandra slept when they visited the house."

I promise to search through my recently acquired bound volumes of Country Life as I feel sure there's an article on Bryanston in there somewhere, but I urge you to visit the Bryanston School site, which is delightful, and proof positive that sometimes what comes afterward isn't so bad after all.