Departed Grandeur

There are few things more guaranteed to provoke a pleasurable wallow in melancholy than a ruin. For me, exiled in Brooklyn, with temperatures rising, the air-conditioner on the blink and police sirens screaming down Flatbush Avenue, reading the opening pages of Roderick Grant’s Strathalder was just the thing for an enjoyable reflection on the dust and ashes of worlds now disappeared.

Grant begins his depiction of the life of a Scottish estate by describing the estate’s farms and cottages, greenhouses, potting sheds, dairies and laundry rooms – all now abandoned to rowan trees and wandering sheep. You won’t find Strathalder on a map – it is a composite portrait of an estate made up from interviews and the reflections of those who worked, indoors and outdoors, on Scottish estates between the wars. The book first appeared in 1978, only some thirty years after the shepherds, ghillies, gamekeepers and dairymaids had been dispersed by the Second World War. Even so, Nature had already covered man’s tracks at Strathalder with devastating speed and efficiency. The son of a Scottish gamekeeper himself, Grant portrays the estate in ‘a time of opulence and dignified magnificence’, a period of order and harmony, when laird and servant worked together in mutual respect to maintain and preserve the natural order of both land and home. Yet what makes Strathalder such an interesting book is the ambiguities that inevitably leak out around the edges of the straightforward accounts that Grant has put together, and which reveal a much more elaborate filigree of relationships. By the 1930s, the huge social changes of the mid-twentieth century had already brought with them the end of assumptions and mores that had never been as old as they appeared. The era of the great Scottish sporting estate with its legions of dairymaids, footmen and housekeepers, its groaning tables of silver, its carefully cultivated traditions of leisure and hospitality, in fact lasted for less than a hundred years. It reached its apotheosis in the early years of the twentieth century, buoyed up by the lavish expenditure of the Edwardian plutocracy, but between the wars its death knell was already sounding, and by 1945 the life of the Victorian estate was almost entirely destroyed by taxation and by working- and middle-class attitudes altered entirely by the experience of war. In a revealing interview with a modern laird, at the end of Grant’s book, we learn how the estate he inherited now survives by renting out stretches of the river for rich businessmen on fishing expeditions, or for commercial shoots or deerstalking. ‘What a truly splendid way to order one’s life and one’s affairs,’ muses the laird’s son as he looks back on the estate in his parents’ time. And from his point of view it was splendid indeed. In the 1930s, his mother could have expected to employ a butler, two footmen, a cook and kitchen staff as well as housemaids, parlourmaids and drivers; every morning, the gardener would produce fresh fruit and vegetables from a beautifully maintained garden worked by several under-gardeners. In 1978, her daughter-in-law does all the cooking herself and instead of dawn-rising housemaids, there are two women who come in from the village to help with the cleaning; one gardener keeps the lawns mown. The new laird finds running the estate (or keeping it going) a thankless task: he has to contend with punitive death duties and employment rights while retaining an old-fashioned sense of the duties of care that go with the privileges of ownership: ‘If I go under financially it will not be only myself and my family who will suffer.’ He draws the line at caravan sites – a lucrative option for many neighbouring estates – but is contemplating the possibility of restoring some of the ruined cottages and making them into holiday lets. We don’t learn what became of that idea in the age of the Internet and it would be intriguing to know if it was successful. He sounds like a managing director sinking under the burden of paperwork: ‘It’s a hard job to keep pace with bureaucracy today and no longer possible to play the game by the rules.’ Ah, the rules. There were so many of them. None written down of course and yet all tacitly understood by their participants. At their best the rules implied a mutual respect, a care for the welfare of the edifice of the whole household; at their worst they were simply an excuse for arrogance and exploitation. Mostly they were a mixture of both. The assumptions of class were not just about money but about morality, about compassion towards those dependent on them. For servants, what made their social superiors ‘ladies’ or ‘gentlemen’ was not the size of their bank account or the cut of their tweeds but their behaviour – the laird’s wife who behaved snobbishly towards the children of an employee was despised as not being ‘a lady’. The new laird, who can’t afford to patronize local business and support the village church and school financially as his father did, feels more awkward about the new order, has inherited the mantle of responsibility without the blithe certainties that once went with it: ‘I don’t go round the estate at Christmas and the New Year wishing everyone the compliments of the season (as my father did), but I do try to convey my best wishes to those who live and work on the estate through the various departmental heads.’ Memories of the previous generation, that last gasp of feudalism, are mixed – as they always are. For the old guard, the over-professionalization of the skills, for example, of the ghillie, had meant declining standards to suit the declining knowledge of the estate’s new clients. Simple but important skills and rituals had been lost: a former housemaid remembered the satisfaction of a beautifully polished table; a laundry maid the pleasure of heavy white linen sheets billowing on their line in a warm breeze; morning and evening the laird’s personal piper would walk the battlements to wake the members of the household and close the day. Others (among them a chauffeur – perhaps most emblematic of the new guard) remember feeling trapped by the lack of opportunity and resenting the highhanded ways of the laird’s wife (there is a devastating and not unusual account of a cook who found herself pregnant and was turfed out with her baby). I wonder what has happened to Strathalder now. Roderick Grant remembered that his childhood was ‘dominated by Nature’ – ‘a world of foxes and rabbits, red grouse and pheasants’. The estate laundries may be strangled by belladonna, there may now be caravan sites and golf courses in sight of the great house, but there will be rabbits, foxes and grouse for many years to come.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 23 © Lucy Lethbridge 2009