I can’t believe I am still writing about Beaulieu, but here we are. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.
What’s interesting, too, is that its displays are going to tell us more about the position of women in a big house like this - and for once we don’t just have to talk about stitching. Because in Beaulieu the route to the embroidery takes us through a corridor devoted to two women from the house. What it reveals is an interesting tale of the limits of what is acceptable for upper class women to do. And what is not.
The two women whose stories are told in this in-between space are Elizabeth Montagu and Pearl Crake/Montagu/Pleydell-Bouverie. They both had eventful lives, even if Pearl’s events were mostly marriages, and they were connected by John, 2nd Baron Montagu. Born in 1866, he led an entirely standard aristocratic life with a bit of government, and quite a lot of leisure and two wives. He is mainly notable for being the first Montagu to be interested in motoring and so setting in train the course of events which led, in the end, to the Top Gear Experience.
Elizabeth, born in 1909, was one of his two daughters from his first marriage; Pearl was his second wife who gave him three more daughters but crucially (and oh my is it crucial if you own a house like Beaulieu) in 1926ba son and heir too.
So Pearl became Elizabeth’s stepmother. And reading between the lines, even the very positive ones on the corridor, I don’t think this went entirely well. Because until Pearl and Edward arrived on the scene, Elizabeth had been the apple of her father’s eye, groomed almost as a son to take over the estate when he died. He called her ‘Little Feller’ and took her around with him.
But once Pearl arrived and had Edward Elizabeth was as placeless and irrelevant as any other aristocratic daughter. Worse than that, Pearl was now here to make sure that she conformed to the expectations of her sex and class.
I wish I could say that this decision was an anomaly, but it’s not. It’s the absolute norm for upper class women, for whom intelligence and education were seen as potentially debilitating handicaps in the marriage market.
Most upper class girls were so badly educated (and there is a comparison with their brothers to be noted here who all without fail went to school and mostly to Oxford or Cambridge after that) that there was little danger of them going to university. But for those who did consider it, like Lady Cynthia Manners, the position was made clear.
To be associated with a university education would undoubtedly be a scandal it would take many seasons to live down. I’m sure my father thought I might just as well be branded on the brow.
So, in keeping with Pearl’s sense of propriety, finishing school was as far as it went for Elizabeth. She - like many other upper class girls - found the Season to be a total waste of time and energy and refused to take part. Instead she took car maintenance classes and used her oily fingernails as an excuse not to go to balls and lunch parties. Then she enrolled at RADA as a contemporary of Vivien Leigh.
From this point onwards, I am pleased to report that she led an excellently rackety life, working in Rep theatre, the West End and in BBC Radio plays, travelling Europe, learning piano, working as an ambulance driver in France in World War Two and having to make her escape through Vichy territory while also fitting in a series of affairs with both sexes. After the war, she worked for Alexander Korda, a job which included introducing Graham Greene to dodgy bars in Vienna, and then set up one of the first television advertising companies, only getting married at the age of 53 to another advertising executive.
I know all of this because I have read her memoirs which are on sale at the shop in Beaulieu and which are a surprisingly good read, but you can get a bit of a flavour of her life from Wikipedia too.
All in all she is an excellent advertisement for the kind of life that can be lived if you don’t inherit an estate and refuse to conform to the usual rules for women of your class. But she is unusual. Very few others dared to be so rebellious, and so many women were crushed under the weight of expectations of breeding, class and propriety. It’s a vast patriarchal waste of lives and talent, so I am very pleased to cheer the very few who made a break for it,even when they didn’t get to go to university. So hurrah for Elizabeth.