FAMILY FORTUNES

My previous post, A Tale of Two Fathers, looked at the unlikely interactions in postwar Britain of two families at opposite ends of the social scale. I continue that theme here with a different bit of the aristocracy, illustrated by the photograph of my migrant Irish grandfather, Tom Minogue and other farm workers, mingling with children and nannies of the Mowbray and Stourton family. A fine piece of rural nostalgia, concealing some brutal social realities.

The story goes that in about 1908 Grandad was in a field directing the operations of an Irish harvesting gang when the 24^th Lord Mowbray (and Premier Baron of England) rode by on horseback and cried to his Agent: “I want that man to work for me!”. So he did, on the Allerton Park estate in Yorkshire, as gardener then farm labourer for the next 28 years, living in the small estate cottage where he and my Granny brought up their 11 children. When the notoriously irascible William Stourton inherited as 25^th Baron Mowbray in 1936, he soon peremptorily sacked this loyal family servant and many other staff, including my mother Josephine, who for the previous six years had been a kitchen maid in the estate Castle.

Perhaps it was nostalgia for the place where they first met that persuaded my parents to return to Allerton Park to work for this very same man in the early 1950s, with Dad as the effective manager of the main estate Home Farm. This was the first house we lived in (me now aged 12, my sisters 9 and 3) to have electricity, mains water, and an inside lavatory and bathroom. This seeming idyll was blown apart when Lord Mowbray abruptly sacked Dad, accusing him of involvement in the secret theft and sale of cattle. Mum and Dad and their three children were given only two weeks to find a new job and tied cottage. Since no one locally believed this charge for a minute, Dad quickly found a sympathetic local farmer to give him a job and a house. It later transpired that others were behind the nefarious practice, and Lord Mowbray sent his son Charles to offer Dad’s job back. He proudly refused the offer.

These are grim stories of mistreatment of loyal workers by an uncaring and uncompassionate upper class employers who behaved this way because they could, without any redress.  Dad and his father before him were victims in part of the ‘tied cottage’ system, which gave farm workers no protection against such evictions. I do not forget that, unforgivably, the post-1945 Labour Government did nothing to prevent such abuses in this pernicious system.

We might think that a leading family in the Catholic part of the English aristocracy should have behaved better to its predominantly Catholic servants and workers. Well, some of the family did; but only on the female side of the equation. First, my mother retained for many years a long connection with Miss Mary Stourton, sister of the appalling William. I recall shyly being introduced to her in her Otley home so that Mum could show off my grammar school uniform. She also left £1000 in her will to my Auntie Pat, a friend and companion since childhood on the estate. Moreover, another Mary, niece of the appalling William, and then by marriage the Countess of Gainsborough, always maintained personal contact with my Aunt Peggy, throughout Aunt Peggy’s long life as a Carmelite nun. I see these manifestations of feminine friendship and support as essentially part of a long tradition in the Catholic aristocracy that they should hold some responsibility for the welfare and well-being of the Catholic people who worked for them.

What a pity that this spirit of charity and social responsibility was not to be found among the men in the family. Not that this carelessness did the men much good. The 25^th Baron’s public reputation was destroyed by a court case in which he was found to have behaved with cruelty to his wife, who was rescued by a lorry driver when she fled from her husband to the Great North Road in the middle of the night. Relations with his son Charles were also badly affected by a messy disagreement over the estate finances and inheritance provisions. Charles, made some kind of political career in the House of Lords, and was by all accounts popular with his peers. His son Edward, 27^th Baron, seems to have led a rather sad and inconsequential life until his recent death after a fall, having abandoned Allerton Castle to one of those curious wealthy Americans who seem to yearn for the aristocracy they had long ago rejected. At least he was always friendly to my Auntie Agnes, as a regular patron in the pub she and her husband ran for a time in Knaresborough marketplace.

At one point, when just 14, I had occasion to act as an assistant bag handler to Charles Stourton during the shoots then organised by Lord Mowbray, essentially ways to bolster the increasingly hard-pressed finance of the estate. I was extremely impressed by the fact that he was able to shoot at all, given the piratical black patch he wore over an eye lost during the war, and later he would be Captain of the House of Lords shooting team. He was rather brusque with me, as I had not been brought up to all this gun and cartridge handling. For my part, I could scarcely conceal my distaste at having to collect together a series of dead and disarranged birds. Many years later, as 26^th Baron Mowbray, he would walk the same corridors of power in the Foreign Office as I had. He had never been reconciled to his father, who bypassed Charles and left the Allerton estate to Charles’ own son Edward. We were destined not to meet again as adults, but I doubt he would have recognised me, either socially, or as a former bagman.

If I examine these people and their lives, and look at my own family and its story, I see that both have had their due share of difficulty and hardships. But I’m pretty certain that my family instinctively knew more about how to lead a happy and fulfilled life than their erstwhile social superiors did. I’m glad that I was born on the right side of this social divide.

A detailed account of the social ups and downs of life on an aristocratic estate can be found in Chapters 1 and 2 of Shifting Classes (in the 1900s to the 1930s), and Chapters 7 and 8 (the early 1950s).