Meme time
Follow the money
What follows is both a coda to the last two posts about Wentworth Woodhouse and an introduction to what - unless I get hopelessly distracted - will be the next theme I want to explore.
And we’re starting with a meme.
This hit social media in 2016, but to understand why it exists, we need to see what had happened to Wentworth Woodhouse after 1945.
Since Manny Shinwell’s incursions into the grounds, the Fitzwilliams had let the front - very long - part of Wentworth Woodhouse to a college which trained women PE teachers and retreated into the smaller (!) Baroque half at the back.
This all worked fine until 1988 when Sheffield Polytechnic, who’d absorbed the Lady Mabel College1, decided that it could no longer afford a full repairing lease on a large stately home. The Fitzwilliams decided they didn’t want the burden either, and so put the house on the market. It passed through a couple of owners and then was put up for sale once again in 2016.
The result was that Wentworth Woodhouse was ‘saved for the nation’, a process which included a massive grant from the government. One of the side effects was that meme.
Jacob Rees-Mogg was irate enough about it to comment.
It is nonsense. My mother-in-law's father owned Wentworth Woodhouse until 1948 when he died. It has never belonged to my mother-in-law and is now in the ownership of a charity that is seeking to save it for the nation. Social media is full of this sort of rubbish as most people know.
Jacob Rees-Mogg’s mother in law is Lady Juliet Tadgell, who you might remember from the last post as being a racehorse trainer, very rich and the most recent owner of Whistlejacket, and quite a few other paintings. She is the daughter of the last Earl Fitzwilliam and lived at Wentworth Woodhouse until she was fourteen, so it very much was her actual home even though, as a woman, she was never actually going to own it, what with the general sexism of aristocratic inheritances. The house also meant enough to her that she gave both her children - including Helena, the one who married Rees-Mogg - the middle name of Wentworth.
So the meme is entirely factually correct. Wentworth is definitely Jacob Rees-Mogg’s wife’s ancestral home, and whether it belonged to his mother in law or not is neither here nor there.
But this argument is also a red herring. Ownership and ancestry are not the main point of the meme. What it wants us to get angry about is that the government pleads poverty when it’s a question of decent housing for ordinary people, but seems to have plenty of money to spend on the large and obsolete homes of the upper classes.
For me, this isn’t just a question about whether Wentworth Woodhouse is worth it or not, something I haven’t entirely made my mind up about. It’s drawing attention to a process which has been going on for the last seventy years.
Ever since World War Two, a total firehose of money has been directed at stately homes and quite often - although not in the case of Wentworth - at keeping the upper classes in ancestral houses that they can no longer afford. And this money comes, almost entirely, from the labours and sacrifices of ordinary people.
But behind all the grants and tax reliefs is one basic principle. For centuries aristocracy has been built on exploitation. There’s no reason to expect these leopards to change their spots in just seventy years. Exactly how this has happened is what I’m hoping to pick apart over the next couple of posts.
There is a whole story in the name of the college alone. Lady Mabel Smith had been born a Fitzwilliam, sister of the 7th Earl, but became a Labour politician in Sheffield, apparently as a result of the poor conditions that she saw on her father’s estates. This apparently caused a total family rift and no one was allowed to mention her in the house. Despite this, she was pivotal to ensuring Wentworth’s survival, by bringing in the teacher training college, which ended up being named after her.