I can’t remember where I heard about this book. It was on my long Amazon wish list for a while, until one Christmas a few years back when Leo, my son, chose it as my present. Since then it’s sat in my bookshelf waiting patiently to be read until it found its way onto my 2026 interwar reading list. It’s a survey of aristocratic British country house life between the wars, so an obvious choice. By the time I got around to reading it, Leo had long forgotten giving it to me and was surprised when I told him he was the original purchaser. I don’t know much about Adrian Tinniswood the author. Wikipedia tells me he is professor of history at the University of Buckingham and a trustee of the National Trust. He is a prolific author and has written books on Christopher Wren, The Royal Society, and architecture, but he specialises in the British aristocracy and their houses. This is the second book I’ve read this year titled “The Long Weekend”. He freely admits that he borrowed the title from the Robert Graves book. It’s a large format paperback with lots of pictures, published in 2016.

One of my favourite quotes is William Gibson’s “The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed”. Tinniswood points out that the same is true of the past, that if we take, say, the year 1930, then people in their 50s would have been born Victorians in the 1870s and many of the social attitudes that prevailed would be Victorian and Edwardian. So while the interwar period saw large agricultural estates become less viable with changes in taxation and trade patterns, the ones that survived continued to support the same country lifestyles largely unchanged from before the first world war. Shooting and hunting were very popular with the upper class. Some of the figures are astonishing. The Marquess of Ripton was said to have killed over 370,000 creatures during his lifetime. Winston Churchill’s father, Randolph, apparently once accidentally shot and killed a fellow guest’s pet dachshund. In order to make amends, he had it stuffed and presented to its bereaved owner as a Christmas present. In a glass case.

In addition to the surviving aristocratic estates there were also a number of newcomers. In many cases they brought wealth earned abroad. A good example is Philip Sassoon, who built the sumptuous palace of Port Lympne in Kent. Despite the fashionable luxury and sublime surroundings, Sassoon, as a Jew, was always considered something of an outsider, and frequently the subject of racial slurs. Chips Channon, an American, whose diaries have been my bedtime read for most of this year, bought Kelvedon in Essex. He was a tireless social climber and cultivated royalty and the upper echelons of the aristocracy. He appears to have been more accepted than Sassoon, and even married into the fabulously wealthy Guinness family.

In a bizarre juxtaposition of old and new, a small number of modernist country houses were built during the period. A good example is Landfall House in Poole, a minimalist white cube, filled with every modern convenience, but still constructed with a service wing for housing the servants. The layout of newer houses did change, with the traditional large hall merging with the sitting room, and the kitchen moving adjacent to the dining room. New amenities such as electricity, hot and cold running water, and flushing toilets were also often introduced into older houses, often insisted upon by the wealthy American wives of hard-up aristocrats looking for an infusion of cash to keep their estates afloat. New professions emerged, notably the interior decorator. Why anyone would need help deciding how to furnish their house would have seemed ludicrous to earlier generations, but new arbiters of taste, such as Sibyl Colefax, combined their social contacts with business, preying on a fear of appearing old-fashioned to persuade their clients/friends that they needed professional advice. Tinniswood also describes the Georgian revival that swept through fashionable society, in particular the activities of Ronnie Tree and Nancy Field, who were the leading designers of this movement. They were helped by Sir Philip Sassoon, who held annual exhibitions of Georgian furniture, art, and fittings at his mansion in London.

Homosexuality was illegal during the interwar period, but many of the most famous, or perhaps notorious, characters of the era were quite openly gay. Of course this includes our friend Chips Channon, but also names such as Siegfried Sassoon, Stephen Tennant, Rex Whistler, Noel Coward, and Cecil Beaton. Tinniswood describes Beaton’s extravagant costume parties at his estate, Ashcombe, in Wiltshire, where libertine behaviour was indulged and discretion was assured. Prosecutions were only brought if a scandal erupted into the public domain and that was harder to engineer than one might imagine. The press were notably circumspect in those days only openly reporting a scandal if it couldn’t be ignored. Tinniswood describes the case of Earl Beauchamp who openly carried on sexual affairs with young footmen and “tennis coaches”. He was eventually outed by his outraged brother-in-law, a man called Bender (of all things).

The interwar country house was staffed by an army of servants, the vast majority of whom were women. Tinniswood relates the career of Herbert Parker, a boy who went into service at age 14 and rose to become butler and valet to the Earl of Shaftesbury where he came into contact with the royal family and various heads of state, even at one point being reprimanded by Kaiser Wilhelm. His attitudes were those of his employers, decrying the rise of the Labour Party and a lifelong conservative voter. WWII saw the final ending of the country house lifestyle. Many houses were requisitioned for use by the military and badly knocked about, and often sold off after the war. Few wanted to work as domestic servants when there were so many alternative employment opportunities in the booming 50s and 60s. My own story links to this. I grew up in a minor country house, St. Julians, in Sevenoaks, Kent. It was bought cheap in the early 50s by a socialist cooperative that my grandparents were connected with. The Herries family who built the house in the 19th century and had lived there ever since could no longer afford its upkeep.

The Long Weekend was a very enjoyable easy read. Tinniswood writes well. There is much dry humour, but the overall tone is nostalgic. He laments the passing of the aristocratic caste and the culture of deference that supported it. I find it hard to sympathise with a society so inequitable that the only option for many poor women is domestic servitude. The bloodsport, the cruelty to their own children packed off to boarding school at too young an age, and the outrageous snobbery and cliquiness are hard to justify. Of course the aristocracy and their country estates still survive in small pockets. In the area around Lewes we have the Gages at Firle, the estates of Iford and Glynde, and Glyndebourne opera house. They’ve had to become business savvy to survive, either with efficient farming, or some other use of the house and grounds; Glyndebourne is a great example. My own childhood home, St. Julians, is now an exclusive country club. What no longer survives are the armies of domestic servants, the leisured lifestyle, and a guaranteed position in government that a place in the aristocracy would have previously assured.