Grousing

More things we are not being shown

Back in Stourhead. As this is the second-closest stately home to my house, and owned by the National Trust, I’ve had more than enough time to think about it. But mostly this is good, because the closer you look, the more interesting things become.

And so our starting point today is this fellow, currently on display in the house.

The plaque reads:

Bonham Hanging; My First Shot at Stourhead. Oct. 29th 95. H.H.A.H

H.H.A.H. is Sir Henry Hugh Arthur Hoare, the 6th Baronet and final owner of Stourhead. There is more to be said about him in due course, but for now we’re going to focus on the bird.

To be a male member of the aristocracy was to shoot things, in particular birds. Huge swathes of the autumn and winter were devoted to shooting on one’s own estate, travelling to other people’s houses to shoot there and thinking about where and what to shoot next. It was very much a sign of status.

So this piece of taxidermy represents a rite of passage. It’s almost certainly not the first bird shot by Sir Henry Hugh Arthur - he was 30 at the time. But what it represents is his acquisition of Stourhead after the death of a cousin. He moved in during 1895. So this bird signals his taking possession of the estate in the requisite manner.

But what’s more interesting, at least to me, is that this is the only piece of taxidermy on show. This is not how things used to be, and the change is very revealing.

To start with, the National Trust Collections website (which has a lovely set of filters which let me discover all sorts of fun things) tells me that there are four other items of taxidermy at Stourhead which are in storage - a deer’s head, a trout, an osprey standing on a carp, and some rather manky looking bits of fox.

So the big question is, where have the rest gone?

I don’t ask this lightly. Stuffed cases of birds were an almost universal feature of the Victorian country house. A few years ago, for another book entirely, I read the auction particulars of Eaglesham House in Scotland, which was sold between the wars.

I’m sharing the picture partly because it looks quite a lot like the Traitors’ castle, but anyway. In the entrance halls alone the catalogue records 179 cases of stuffed birds and animals. So many hundreds of individual pieces of taxidermy, the vast majority of which were, I imagine, shot by the owners of the estate, just like our white pheasant friend at the start of the post.

This was pretty standard going for these grand houses. And Stourhead was no exception. An inventory of 1838 reveals fifteen cases of stuffed birds in one room alone. So where have they all gone?

This turns out to be part of a much bigger question. Because the Stourhead which was bequeathed to the National Trust looks nothing like the house we visit today. Here’s one of the main rooms in about 1900.

And here it is at some point in the 1980s, looking considerably sparser. Some of the pictures are in the same place but the furniture is very different.

So what happened in the interim? The answer is James Lees-Milne.

Diarist, writer and weapons-grade snob, Lees-Milne deserves a post or three of his own. He and his efforts are crucial to so many of the country houses we traipse round. As the National Trust’s country house specialist just after the war, he was responsible for negotiating, at at time when few aristocrats saw any future for their estates as private property, which ones would be accepted for the nation.

When Stourhead was willed to the charity in 1947, Lees-Milne did not approve of the decor.

[The rooms] were cluttered with knick-knacks to an extent hardly creditable by a housewife of today. […] There were occasional-tables bursting with bric-a-brac, miniatures, beads, buttons, rings and trinkets of every description. On every shelf and piano lid were forests of silver trowels, silver vases containing decayed peacock’s feathers and silver photograph frames of relations, maharajas and royalty.

So he set to work, redecorating, reorganising and - crucially - disposing. Some of the furniture went off to other Trust houses; other ‘surplus clutter’ was sold to local dealers.

So what we are not seeing at Stourhead, and indeed at many other National Trust properties, is an English Country House Preserved. Instead it’s a museum, and mostly a museum of post-war taste. I will have plenty to say about this in the future but if you want more now, I can heartily recommend this blogpost on Lees-Milne and his doings.

One of the things which was almost certainly re-organised out of the house were all those cases of taxidermied game. Remember, this is 1947, before John Betjeman had even tried to resurrect stuffed birds under glass domes as part of appreciating Victorian taste. It was impossible to imagine that anyone might ever want them.

This has two results . One is yes, we are not seeing the house as a historical artefact. But the other is that we are not seeing the aristocracy for who they were. As I’ve said above, shooting birds constituted a huge part of their time, their thought processes, their money and their class identity.

But shooting was also a really grim pastime. While chasing a pheasant might have been something more like stalking in the eighteenth century, the advent of quicker loading guns, carefully reared pheasants, and the idea that the lower classes could be used to drive these semi-tame birds towards you, made this less of a hunt and more of a massacre. In 1800, a good day’s shooting would have been 120 birds; in 1872 Frederick Milbank and five of his friends shot 2072 birds in one session. He was so pleased with himself that he erected an obelisk to commemorate this event.

Far more partridge and pheasant were shot than could ever have been eaten at these big houses, but - for complicatedreasons of class status - they could not be given to the poor. So gamekeepers often dug big pits and just buried the bodies. The whole process was, and still is, an obscenity.

This is why the birds need to be on display. While the National Trust may be looking a bit harder at slavery, the rest of their efforts are very much dedicated to making the aristocracy who lived in these houses appear to be nice, reasonable people.

I think it’s time we started telling the truth.