The Fall of the House of Montagu by Robert Wainwright: ‘I’ve been so broke I have only
The Fall of the House of Montagu by Robert Wainwright (Allen & Unwin £22, 352pp)
The Fall of the House of Montagu is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Oh to have been a bidder at the 1949 clearance sale of Kimbolton Castle in Cambridgeshire, the crenelated seat of the Dukes of Manchester!
Two Van Dycks went for a mere £21 and £50. A Corot went for £30, a Canaletto for £150 and a Titian for £105. The castle had been compulsorily purchased and was being turned into a boarding school.
Britain was steeped in the murk of post-war austerity, plus ridiculously high inheritance tax rates, sweeping aristocratic families out of their houses. No one seemed to want those now-priceless treasures.
Lords and dukes were taking on menial jobs to pay the bills. Lord Mowbray had a milk round and Lord Garnoch ran a laundry. That generation of aristocrats was dragged into the modern age in which a title was not enough to ensure a comfortable existence.
The 10th Duke of Manchester at that moment was Alexander, nicknamed ‘Mandy’ for ‘Lord Mandeville’. His dissolute father, the 9th Duke, had felt the chill wind of poverty back in 1933.
He’d pawned his dead mother’s jewels, which he was briefly jailed for. He protested in court, ‘I have four estates but I live in a flat because I can’t afford to live in any of the castles. I’ve been so broke I have only just been able to pay for my valet’s meals.’
Poor man! But as Robert Wainwright writes in his lively chronicle of the decline of the Montagus, the dodgy duke gambled away a fortune in Monaco, once losing £27,000 in an evening. His son Mandy was determined not to fall into such a pitiful state.
Luckily, he’d married a plucky Australian called Nell Stead, who became the first-ever Australian duchess. Mandy and Nell met in a swimming pool in Colombo in what was known as Ceylon. ‘There was a sexy man standing near to me dressed in his undies,’ Nell recalled. Mandy proposed days later.
Alexander, the 10th Duke of Manchester married Nell Stead, who became the first ever Australian Duchess
Nell had a beautiful figure and swore like a trooper. Describing what she wore for George VI’s coronation in 1937, she wrote in her diary, ‘I looked absolutely stupidly out of date. I have seen f***ing dolls dressed better.’ A typical letter from her to a female friend would start ‘Well, Kid, how is your sex life?’
But they had business sense combined with zest for life and no fear of danger. During the war, when Mandy went to sea with the Royal Navy, he was awarded an OBE for outstanding courage when a bomb went off and he saved many lives. Nell followed him to Singapore and Colombo, where she joined the Red Cross as a nurse. They had two sons, Sidney and Angus.
After the war, they bought a 10,000-acre estate in the highlands of Kenya, which they ran as a successful farm, dealing with horrors such as Mau Mau insurgents killing cattle (as a terrifying message humans would be next). But they didn’t flee like many other expats.
Their story was not one of catastrophic decline and fall. This book is not as satisfying or as gripping as Wainwright’s previous book Enid (‘Lady Killmore’), but it paints a memorable picture of how post-war British aristocrats had to adapt or die.