Did forebears of yours live in a grand country pile?

[Timpeall]

Be it a Highclere Castle type affair, a minor country estate in Somerset, maybe some kind of Tudor manor house.

I'm watching The Little Stranger which is set post-WWII and shows a family who can very much not afford to keep the family seat going. It's all dust and decay and slogging away doing their own cooking and cleaning.* God, it's so depressing watching these people in their ramshackle home with the days of former splendour still in living memory. They don't have so much as a ladies maid to throw a hairbrush at anymore.

And I know these houses could only exist for so long because they were able to exploit their servants by paying them two shillings and thrupence and only giving them a half Sunday's holiday every six weeks. But it's still quite poignant.

And then I thought, there must be lots of people living in nice comfy four bed semi-detached houses whose ancestors at some point lived in some seriously impressive gaffs. Do they have framed sepia pictures of the old ancestral pile on the wall?

*These poor buggers also have the added hassle of some ghostly demon.

Yes, great grandad lived and died in a country pile. Sadly it was a lunatic asylum !

Yes several country piles, but thanks to then being descended from the female lines or the youngest sons there is nothing to show for it all this time on.

My GF and GM somehow acquired a stately pile after the war (they were solidly working class and I do not know how it came about) but it was the pile of some Lord Admiral of the Navy in bygone era, and they ran it as a hotel for a while. When my DM brought us back to live in UK from Far East, we stayed with them in the grounds. By then the actual pile was a real pile, of rubble and charred remains (hmm, @Londonmummy66 !) but that was never really clarified. So we lived in the chicken shed, a long concrete building with our camp beds lined up along the wall. DM used to bathe us in the sink. At that time the GP’s were living in a tiny wooden chalet reached by stairs at the top of a hill in the ginormous grounds. Bizarre. And there was Brigadier Pete, of the Empire ilk, living in a lovely cottage in the grounds, having survived the war (Burma etc) widowed, with a lovely young daughter my older bro had a huge crush on. I wish I knew more about him. The grounds were huge, but completely overgrown and wild - sunken gardens, woods etc. We ran wild. My uncles (who didn’t have their own families then) would start water fights, all of us would career around chucking buckets (or in my case, flannels)my oldest bro fell through the roof of the stable block (no broken bones, surprisingly) We had bonfires, made camps, and could run down a lane to the beach, get buckets of cockles and mess about. If anyone parked on the entrance to the huge curving driveway in front of the massive iron gates (for access to the beach) my GF would go and let their tyres down ! Anyway when they came to sell and move into town to be closer to my mum and amenities, no one in the family could muster the price of the land. Although it was actually a pittance by today’s standard. It was redeveloped into a very posh housing estate and when my bro took me through it years ago I was aghast. I hold those memories dear, I was a raggle taggle tomgirl, we had so much freedom. I still have a huge Victorian mirror that was saved from the original house. It must have been amazing in it’s heyday.

Yes. The property is no longer owned by the family, though (great grandparents sold it decades ago). I love looking at photographs, it could easily pass for a National Trust estate!

No, they were working for the people who had houses like that, my gran worked as a scullery maid for a rich family before getting married.

@ThatIsNotMyUsername

Yes. Then - very mills & boon - she ran off with a stable boy and was disowned. And on the other side all the property and land was given to the church by a dotty ancestor.

I have a similar dotty ancestor

OP, yes mine did and some still do, but I'm descended from younger sons so my immediate family are soldiers and farmers.

Yes, my distant cousins live in a big place in Windsor but they also have a London house they use quite a bit. Plus one in Scotland and another in Norfolk. They own multiple other properties too - too many to list

No but my great grandfather was a gamekeeper on one and my grandad grew up there and worked there too until he was moved in the war. Mum bought him a wonderful painting of the place as a military base on the war.

Mine on my father's side owned mills and presumably had a big house. A long time ago though and I live in a council flat now so definitely letting the side down.

No opposite here, one grandmother was one of 9 grew up in a tiny cottage that would have been a practically a hovel but now due to SE house prices is worth a fortune. Her dad was a drunken miller! The other one lost her parents early on and spent some time in the workhouse

They'd both think we'd hit the big time with our reasonably sized detached house!

On one side way WAY back there was significant money and favouritism. There was also plenty of them keeping these country piles going with hard labour.

In the main though no. My branch of the family got where they were and we are from less than nothing.

There used to be a TV series called Country House Rescue which was about the difficulty of making enough money from a big house to pay for it's upkeep. I've always thought that if when I win the lottery I'd restrain myself and buy a modest house to save my descendants the stress.

Yes, West Horsley Place. The one where they film the show Ghosts and the recent film version of My Cousin Rachel.

Did they fuck

No,
but some of them were owned by people living in castles and manors (Leibeigene).

Yes, my dad's family lived in lovely Georgian homes with names like 'XYZ House', one of which dad swore was haunted. There are photos from around 1917 of granny, grandad and their young family plus the nursemaids and scullery maids, my oldest aunt and uncle holding tennis racquets. There was a governess who had previously worked for the family of French general, who helped out with the family of one of my aunts many years later, in a completely different time and place, and with me too, as I stayed with my aunt and her family quite a bit.

Family legend has it that my step-grandmother was distantly related to the Queen Mother, so that would qualify.

Family legend is silent however on whether this story has bearing in reality or whether my very much loved but long gone step-GM was embellishing the truth somewhat

Some of DH’s ancestors worked in a big country pile but they definitely didn’t own any of it. Some of mine were in the workhouse, which is at least a substantial period property, no...?

Legend has it that some ancestors on my dad’s side were once very well-to-do, but since I’m NC with all of them I’ve no way to verify this 🤷‍♀️

How do you all know all this? I mean I’ve looked at records, but beyond couple of generations, it begins to get hazy very quickly.

My grandmother and great-aunt were both 'in service' so they would have lived in a Big House for a while.

Lots of land and estate somewhere up north, aristocracy in the 18th century, all sold / given to national trust sometime between the wars last century, if not gambled away in Monaco. The inheritance will run out with my DF who still has said sepia photos, pieces of furniture and ancestral portraits in his now tiny house and feels emotionally responsible for them! Honestly, what a millstone. I spent my childhood Christmases in a beautiful mansion on a massive estate in the south (1000s of acres), and I wouldn’t want the responsibility of looking after a building or grounds like that, or the social isolation/need to keep up appearances associated with being the lady of the manor. Plus it was bloody cold! Give me a little place with affordable central heating any day :-)

Prompted by the original servants bells in our house and members of my family being in service I did a fair bit of research into the reality of Downton. The first things I found was that the vast majority of servants weren’t employed in big county mansions but were “ maids of all work” in domestic houses. And they were women of all ages. Big County Houses were in fact the driving force to the local economy. They provided a market for local produce, work for local trades and employment. Don’t forget , domestic staff got all food and board, all your work clothes and a generally safe working environment. Post WW1 punitive taxes meant a lot of houses were boarded up, sold off or abandoned causing significant hardship and unemployment The alternatives for women to domestic service during the Victorian period were stark.

Yes but the spoilt only son gambled it all away about 160 years ago. One of his younger sisters married a very rich man though.

It’s something like my husbands 12th great grandfather who owned the castle and I googled it to see if it was still standing. We may go for afternoon tea sometime 😄

My grandad was poor, left school to work from 11. One of his jobs every morning was to use a switch go knock the few off the grass so the family could walk without getting damp clothes.
Later he had a job that took him around the country. Accommodation came with his job. Often no running water or electricity.
In 2020 some of these houses are just gorgeous. One has a tea shop and gift shop. My dad and his siblings remember life in these houses as grim, trying to keep fed and warm.