We ended the last post upstairs in Palace House at Beaulieu, looking at the portraits and the dead birds. But there are three rooms left to explore, and we are going to look at the two biggest first.
At the end of our tour of the first floor taking up what must have been a big bedroom and a hall, is ‘The Art of Belinda, Lady Montagu’. Belinda was the current Lord Montagu’s mother and her art comprises quite a lot of sewing. And we also get to see her horse rosettes
The story is fairly typical and might be told of a lot of women in the 1950s and later. Belinda Crossley went to the Central School of Art and worked as an illustrator and commercial artist until she married. At which point she mostly produced things for her children, along with a few bits for the estate, and then once they were grown retrained as an embroiderer.
The twist in the tale is that she married an aristocrat, which makes a few things different. First and most importantly, it means that the bedhead she made for her daughter is not in the attic, but on display in a stately home and her son thinks it entirely reasonable that the visitors want to file past and see it.
[At this stage I have to confess that I did not take half enough pictures because my main reaction was bafflement that I was being expected to look at this stuff and had no idea that I was going to have opinions and want to write about it. Apologies. Most of the images are from the Beaulieu website and the bedhead is not amongst them].
The second is that, while women of her class and generation had no expectations of working once they married, this is magnified many times over if you are an aristocrat. One of the ways in which the upper classes prove that they are rich and therefore powerful is by doing nothing which looks remotely like hard work. But if you’re really posh, just doing nothing yourself isn’t good enough. You also need to employ people to do nothing for you. Which is why they pay footmen wear expensive livery and just stand around for hours on end and wait for an instruction which might never come, and why you need even more of them at parties and grand dinners to display just how much time you can afford to waste.
But these footmen in their (also embroidered) jackets and breeches are not the only people being bored for the purposes of showing off. The idleness of wives and daughters is also required. The Edwardian proto-sociologist who first noticed this, Thorstein Veblen, calls it ‘vicarious leisure’. To ensure they play their correct part in the display of spare time and therefore wealth and power, women cannot be sullied with manual or useful labour; instead they should change their clothes a lot, leave cards at other houses, go out for drives in the carriage and - crucially - not do anything useful. And one of the irrelevant things that has been seen as particularly appropriate for women over the centuries is embroidery.
Women’s business is supposed to be to find something to ‘pass’ the ‘time’ … in drawing or music or literature or worsted work. If I & my sisters were now sitting round the table doing worsted work we should be supposed to be very appropriately and rightly employed - especially if one were reading aloud.
That’s Florence Nightingale, in her book, Cassandra, which is an intense but very clear-eyed look at the place of upper class women in Victorian England.
And so it is no accident that Belinda ends up not being a commercial artist but instead designing “presentation cushions for HM The Queen, HM Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, HRH Prince of Wales and kneelers for the wedding of HRH Prince Edward to Sophie Rhys-Jones.” Which has to be a list of some of the most pointless objects ever designed by humankind. But that, ironically, is the point. Heaven forfend that women should transgress the unwritten rules of the aristocracy and do something useful.
This exhibition and its embroidery, while peculiar in parts, is far from unique. Back last year, in Tyntesfield, I came across this display in a side room.
Well, that’s one way of putting it. And funnily enough, as so often tends to be the case with the National Trust, it’s the interpretation which casts the upper classes in the best light. These women, at least some of them, are bored out of their minds and yet hardly permitted to do anything else. Virginia Woolf described Cassandra as being ‘like screaming’ and she is not wrong. But hey, this is ‘an important social activity’ not an act of oppression.
Because that is what is going on here. The reason that the National Trust has to display embroidery is because it wants to highlight the work of women. And embroidery is all that they have. Women have been permitted to play almost no part in the design or history or collecting which makes up the stately home, and the prevailing point of view is best expressed by James Lees-Milne, who believed that houses acquired by the National Trust fell into three categories:
…the country house created by a great man; the house which becomes the retreat of a great man; and the house which created a great man.
There’s not much evidence out there to the contrary either. Trust houses occasionally host exhibitions about women, but these are - surprise surprise - quite often focused on needlework. They did also try to redress the balance with a book on Women in the Country House which ends up being almost amusing in its desperate flailing to find anything that the women actually did which can still be seen today.
I think it’s time we said this out loud. Stately homes are places where women are marginalised and irrelevant, kept doing meaningless busywork while the men get on with the important stuff. Putting the truth into the captions might make these exhibitions - and indeed these houses - far more interesting.