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.

My Mil was “landed gentry” who were falling on hard times from 1920s-30s onwards. She was an orphan at 19, went to university when it was very unusual, especially for women, and slipped into upper-middle class obscurity. She still points out which household items were wedding presents that came from Harrods, though.
She’s very much a champagne socialist who applauds the principles can’t quite cope with the consequences (relative poverty!) of her children being public sector professionals.

She has a specially commissioned painting of the ancestral home in her hallway.

My family were living in poverty in London. 8 siblings, 2 rooms and a shared outside loo for a family with 6 and 10 siblings respectively sort of poverty.

I am lead to believe that my great grandparents lived in hovels

Nope, agricultural labourers & miners for the men and ‘in service’ for the women.

@passtheorange

One of mine did, but she was a below-stairs servant. When she got pregnant, they threw her out and she ended up in the workhouse.

Mine was a little better off @passtheorange

She worked as a maid in a well-known castle and ended up leaving a year after the eldest son returned with a baby boy. She went up to the castle every year with the baby to collect money apparently.

@DramaAlpaca it's true. My cousin has researched the family tree. Don't be calling someone a liar if you don't know the truth.

@CatsAndDogsAndHorses

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 Aunty got really into family history a few years ago and went back for quite a few generations. Before the workhouse unfortunateness, we had another female ancestor who went from having a number of illegitimate children (most likely with her employer) to becoming the village postmistress. But basically it was a long chain of fairly poor and humble people, like most people I guess. I think MiL did similar for DHs side of the family and we went to find the gravestones of some of ones who were in service too at one point.

Not as far as I know. All very working class people as far back as I know (which isn't very far tbh).

G Grandparents owned a castle in Scotland , cousin is on Antiques roadshow tonight talking about one of the items from there

Lots of sepia photos hanging on various relatives walls !

I do actually have sepia photos of my grandparents’ houses but they weren’t gigantic but fairly big. Also inherited small prints of black and white portraits of random ancestors. On the wall of my 1930s semi! The houses have definitely got smaller over the years!

I don't.

But there's a couple of massive old houses near me (Aberdeenshire, and they look more like castles than stately homes) which are now owned by the National Trust. But they still have photos of "the family" up and the guides explain that the family still meet up for reunions etc in the home.
So although they gave it up/sold to the National Trust (perhaps a couple of generations ago), they retain a link to the house and have the right to use it sometimes.

I assume they are still relatively wealthy. Probably living in a lovely but less grand, easier to maintain house!

A long, long, long ago ancestor was King Henry 3rd. There are also knights in the family tree and a local stately home used to be in our family.

Somehow we found ourselves into slum conditions on Merseyside in the 1920s and have been upgrading from there.

I have been researching the Georgian Season for a blog I will write in a few weeks. In the 1870’s the income of the nobility plummeted, due to a dramatic fall in grain prices and a series of bad harvests. Rural depopulation as people moved to the cities for work, and massive death duties also contributed to the falling fortunes of the estates. Some diversified and remained very wealthy, but many struggled to maintain their houses and sold up. mymotleythoughts.com

Um, I think DramaAlpaca was referring to her own family as opposed to addressing a remark to another poster.

No, my ancestors were chinese peasant fisher folk.
But I don’t think historical manor houses and such in any country should be torn down it is valuable history that should be preserved, many are beautiful to look at and house works of art.

@ProfYaffle I adored country house rescue !

No. Farmers on one side (the farm house was/is nice though) and on the other side, nice red bricked houses in nice parts of Dublin - those houses cost a fortune today but when my grandparents lived there, they were just middle class houses for people doing ok financially. I think.

I read and saw The Little Stranger. I don't want to spoil the ending in the book but I think it was spelled out a lot more clearly in the book. I saw the film and was left thinking, sorry what. They should have just made it clearer. Interesting though that the doctor was the son of the maid and yet he was their great hope later in the book/film. They looked down on him and needed him in equal measures.

@Aintgointogoa what an amazing story like a film !

Nope. But my Nan was a housemaid in one. She was lucky in that the family were quite nice to her, and she stuck with them on and off for decades.

@Londonmummy66

DF's family in dim and distant past owned a stately pile in Ireland. DMs family (also in dim and distant past) burnt it down.

Are you sure it wasn't razed to the ground? That happened to cousins of my grandfathers. Their farm house was razed to the ground and all the men in the family were shot in the genitals and died a slow death. My grandfather ran away. The bullets missed him. It was no wonder he was a terrible father to his own children. It's no wonder my mother projected all of her difficult emotions on to me. It's no wonder my family can only talk about the weather and the garden.

Mine did - but as servants. My great grandmother was in service at various grand houses in England. She had a child - my grandparent - whilst not married and the child had to be adopted, and whilst they knew each other, they never had a proper parent child relationship.

I love a gawp round a national trust house but I love the ones that tell the servants stories most of all.

@Pyewhacket

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.

My Grandmother and her sister both enjoyed their time with the gentry, and, I think, took on some of the manners and ways of speaking. Although they were were working class themselves my father and his brother and cousin always spoke 'properly' and were encouraged in their education.

It was definitely much harder for the maids of all work in smaller houses.

Definitely not.

Interestingly though, in the 60s a relative wanted to start again with their kids after their partner died and considered buying one of these mansions. Apparently they were being sold off very cheaply all over the place.

The cost to renovate would have been insane of course, and most ended up becoming national trust or whatever. They didn't buy it (I doubt they had enough money, even at knock down prices)

I am an Estate Manager so live and work on such an estate in a grace and favour home.

A huge amount of estates were demolished in the 50s, literally thousands. People couldn’t afford the upkeep, sons had been killed in the war and death duties were crippling. They were either demolished or handed over to the National Trust.

I think mine were all very working class

Definitely not. As best my ancestors were the servants, at worst they were Victorian Match Girls on the streets of (the dodgy bits of) London. One of forebears on my Dad’s side was a victim of Christie’s though.

Echo the PP who said to read the book. The book is amazing. One of the scariest things I’ve ever read.