The Yellow Earl E-Book

Douglas Sutherland

• Herausgeber: Merlin Unwin Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 538

Beschreibung

The 5th Earl of Lonsdale, Hugh Lowther, was perhaps the most famous English Lord in the world by the 1880s. His reckless spending of his vast fortune, his womanising, his love of fast-living, horses, hunting and boxing rocked the Edwardian aristocracy and has endeared him to risk-takers and bon-viveurs the world over ever since. As a penniless, wayward, younger son who had not expected to inherit, Hugh had joined a travelling circus for a year after leaving Eton, then moved on to America, spending months buffalo-hunting. He pawned his birthright to make his fortune from cattle ranching in Wyoming and was practically destitute when the scheme failed. But then his older brother unexpectedly died, Hugh took both the title and the vast fortune that went with it, and the rest is history: a close friend of Edward VII, a great public benefactor and an unforgettable showman in everything he did, his biography is a pacey, elegant and fascinating tribute to one of aristocracy's greatest eccentrics.

Leseprobe

The Yellow Earl

ALMOST AN EMPEROR,NOT QUITE A GENTLEMAN

The life of Hugh Lowther5th Earl of Lonsdale, K.G., G.C.V.O.1857-1944

Douglas Sutherland

With a Preface by the present Earl

MERLIN UNWIN BOOKS

Author’s dedication (1965):

To Muriel, Viscountess Lowther,with my thanks for all the helpshe has given me with this book

Hugh Lowther (right), 5th Earl of Lonsdale, at the Grasmere Sports in 1928.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My grateful thanks are due to the 7th Earl of Lonsdale not only for writing the Preface but for giving me full access to the family papers and for many other kindnesses.

I would also like to thank many other people closely associated with the Lowther Estates who have given me valuable assistance. Mr Derek Pattinson, Mr John Peel and Miss D. Ravey in particular have done much to lighten my task. Miss S. E. Bailey, with her long association with the Lowther Estate office, was an invaluable guide through the mass of available material and I was glad to take her advice on many points.

Others, like Sir Gordon Richards, Mr Dick Steel and Mr Charlie Haines, have told me much that has been useful, whilst yet others, such as the Lady Barbara Lowther, the Earl of Carlisle, Mr Denzil Batchelor and Mrs Shirley Shea, have helped with criticism or with expert knowledge.

Finally I would like to tender my most grateful thanks to Muriel, Viscountess Lowther, who has been closely associated with me in the writing of this book and who has contributed much to it. It is to her that this book is affectionately dedicated.

The main source of material for the book has been the letters, Press cuttings and other documents kept in the Lowther archives. Where I have not acknowl-edged the source it is because the cutting has been preserved but not the name of the paper. Considerable use has been made of the life story Lord Lonsdale himself wrote in The People, and the official biography written by Captain Lionel Dawson, R.N., during Lord Lonsdale’s lifetime.

Of the many other books that have been consulted, the principal have been: Sir Shane Leslie Studies in Sublime Failure (Leslie Berm, 1932), Lady Augusta Fane Chit Chat (Thornton Butterworth, 1926), Sir John Astley Fifty Years of My Life (Hurst & Blackett), Mari Sandoz The Cattlemen (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1961), Charles Towne and Edward Wentworth Cattle and Men (University of Oklahoma Press, 1955), Richard Ferguson MPs of Cumberland and Westmorland (Bell and Daldy, 1871), Guy Deghy Noble and Manly (Hutchinson, 1956), Von Bülow Imperial Germany (Cassell, 1914), Colin Ellis Leicestershire and the Quorn Hunt (George Gibbons), Cuthbert Bradley Foxhunting from Shire to Shire (Routledge & Kegan Paul), Denzil Batchelor Jack Johnson, his Life and Times (Sportsman’s Book Club, 1957), Jem Mace In Fair Fight (V. & R. Chambers, 1956), P. Sichel The Jersey Lily (W. H. Allen, 1958).

Douglas Sutherland, 1965

A house party at Barleythorpe. Edward VII and Hugh are standing on the right, Lady Lonsdale seated in the centre, with the Dowager Countess (Pussy) on her right.

CONTENTS

Preface

Memories of the Yellow Earl

Introduction

PART I

THE VICTORIAN

PART II

THE EDWARDIAN

PART III

THE GEORGIAN

Epilogue

Family Tree

Appendixes

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Index

PREFACE

by Hugh Lowther, Rt. Hon. the 8th Earl of Lonsdale

In 1936 my great-great-uncle Hugh Cecil, 5th Earl of Lonsdale re-settled the whole of the Lowther Estates, Lowther Castle, the London Properties and the Rutland Estate on his younger brother, Lancelot. The 5th Earl then retired to his hunting lodge and stables at Barleythorpe near Oakham in Rutland and died eight years later in 1944.

The army requisitioned Lowther Castle and the Lowther Estates for tank development between 1939 and 1945 and turned the Lowther Estates into a huge quagmire of mud and tank tracks, some of which, despite land reclamation, are still visible to this day.

Lancelot took over the management of Lowther from 1936 until he died in 1953. Lancelot’s son Anthony (Viscount Lowther) had died in 1949, not long after I was born that same year.

My father (Anthony’s son) left the army in 1946 and went to work for Parsons Engineering in Newcastle upon Tyne and to live in Corbridge, Northumberland where my sister Jane and I were born. We then moved to live at Lowther for a year and then to the Home Farm, Market Overton in Rutland where my father farmed beef cattle and set up a beef co-operative, which I understand is still in operation today, 64 years later. My father left Rutland in 1953 to take over the running of the Lowther Estate after the death of his father Anthony in 1949 and his grandfather in 1953 – and that is when the troubles began.

In about 1951-52 my father started beef farming in Rutland until he became the 7th Earl of Lonsdale after the death of his grandfather Lancelot in 1953. James became the life tenant to the Lowther Estate, I aged four years became the remainderman to the Lowther Estate as laid down in the 5th Earl’s will.

My father moved to Lowther permanently in 1954, leaving my mother, sister and me at the farm in Rutland. One of my earliest memories is of going to Junior School at Barleythorpe House, my great-uncle’s residence before the war, which had been bought by Rutland County Council. I have another memory of my father showing my sister and me how to slide down the stairs on a tin tray – he broke his leg in the process.

In 1954 my father was able to finally evict the army out of Lowther Castle. He was faced with having to pay £4,000,000 in death duties on behalf of his uncle Hugh and grandfather Lancelot and his father Anthony. Having given up his plan to emigrate to Australia, he decided to turn his energies to Lowther and to try to save the Estate. He employed R. Gibson and then G. Hector to set up and manage beef and sheep farming on Lowther Estate and planted all other available land, including all of Lowther Castle Gardens, with trees as a future long-term investment.

Then followed an Estate sawmill company which supplied all the oak for the supports for crash barriers on the Severn Bridge (when I was 16 years old) and a building company and in 1972 he created the Lowther Caravan Park and the Lowther Horse Driving Trials in 1973 along with a partnership in Lowther – the Croasdale Sawmill at Clifton.

The Lowther Estates continued to grow from strength to strength thereafter.

In 1974, partly to do with the then-80% Inheritance Tax and my father’s divorce from his third wife, an American, with the agreement of his three sons from three different marriages, he split up the Lowther Estates into a variety of separate trusts and also made his third son into the new remainderman for the Estate, therefore protecting the future of the Estates against all-destroying Inheritance Tax.

There is another book to bring the story up to date from the death of my father to present times, which will be put to print either before my death, or after.

Hugh Lowther

July 2015

MEMORIES OF THE YELLOW EARL

by James Lowther, Rt. Hon. the 7th Earl of Lonsdale [1922-2006]

Those of us in the Lowther family who had grown up to know our great-uncle only slightly in the years between the two wars had an image of a person held in great affection in this district where we live, surrounded by legend and spoken of with awe. We knew of his influential life after the first war and were at the receiving end of his great generosity and kindness. We had visited him and our Aunt Gracie in their London house on our way to and from school and watched the processions along The Mall from its windows at the time of the Coronation of George VI. There were stories, of course, that he had been to the North Pole which he used to foster by showing us the snow shoes, stuffed bears, moose heads and so on in Lowther Castle, and that he had been an outstanding Master of the Cottesmore and Quorn Foxhounds, and had performed remarkable feats of horsemanship; but this was not the side of him we knew.

When a boy I remember being taken to Sunday lunch at the Castle and sitting at table on best behaviour from 1.30 to 3.30 p.m. There followed a regular routine of feeding the pigeons and the seemingly endless numbers of ponies, with all the grooms on parade and with the head gardener in attendance in case some detail of the enormous flower-beds or immense lawns should cause comment. Afterwards there would be a visit to the hot-house to inspect the vines or peach trees, or whatever exotic plant should be in bloom. Then we would return to the Castle for tea-which I remember well because of the apple jelly and the minute pieces of very white bread and butter – eaten in the saloon, a room the size of a tennis court with all manner of red plush sofas, chairs and exotic pot-plants growing almost to the height of the room. Uncle Hugh would always give my brother, my sister and myself half-a-crown when we left to go home.

I also remember one never-to-be-forgotten Christmas. My father’s whole family stayed at the Castle and we had a complete wing to ourselves near the stable yard – a wing which still exists and is now occupied as a flat by the family who look after the pig herds and broiler houses on my farm. Whilst there, to the consternation of all, I developed ’flu, and my great-uncle insisted on taking charge. He banished my mother, and personally attended to all that was necessary. He applied his own formula for a cure – a huge blazing coal fire, every window shut, a darkened room, no sheets merely blankets to lie between, poisonous tasting quinine brews to drink, and constant attention. No patient could have had better nursing, and what fun it was to be ill with him throwing strange powders on the fire to produce flames of all the colours of the rainbow. He had a gimmick for every occasion.

I recall a quiet and laughing voice and a person kind and playful but never hearty or boisterous, with side whiskers, a blue pinstriped suit, an ever-present smell of cigars, and an endless supply of gadgets in his pockets which seemed to serve every conceivable purpose. Behind all this I remember Aunt Gracie, a quiet elderly person, seemingly always dressed in dark brown and always in the background.

Lowther Castle itself, to a child, was awe-inspiring, with huge and vault-like halls and corridors and passages – warm but airless. Steady streams of hot air rose from the circular grids at intervals in the stone floors, and the miles of corridors and rooms a small boy had to travel to find a lavatory seemed endless. But after Uncle Hugh had left the Castle in 1935 it became our playground, much to the despair of the caretaker who stalked gloomily through the numberless and huge rooms with the furniture, pictures and ornaments still in their places, but all dust-sheeted. Then the military descended, my brother and I went off to the war, and the next time I saw Lowther was in 1946 when my father was selling the furniture and effects. Gathered together for this sale in the main rooms at the Castle was an enormous collection selected from the contents of the Castle itself with 365 rooms, Carlton House Terrace, the house at Newmarket and my great-uncle’s house in Rutland. So ended my direct memories of Uncle Hugh. Since those days a great deal has happened. The estates collected their fullest possible quota of death duties and I had to carry out a comprehensive scheme of modernization to meet them. The Castle itself is now a ruin, but incidental effects of Uncle Hugh’s long tenancy have paradoxically made my task much easier in rebuilding the estate’s prosperity. Whilst he had not been interested in posterity and had therefore thwarted attempts to plant trees and modernise farms, in the interests of his own personal activities and predilections he had prevented the felling of trees and plantations. By vastly enlarging his park at the turn of the century, he left a great deal of land which provided the foundation for large scale and economic farming, and a fell he had acquired for its grouse shooting is now a highly productive lime works.

I gave Mr Sutherland the opportunity to write this biography two years ago, and when I read through the first drafts he had written, I soon realised that I was reading the story of no ordinary life. Mr Sutherland has successfully managed to compress into 300 pages material which could fill 1,000 and provide inspiration for plays and novels – the extraordinary Wyoming episode, of historical and economic significance in the development of the American West; his relationship with the German Kaiser at the turn of the century (they exchanged Christmas cards right up to the outbreak of the last war); the incredible Violet Cameron affairs; his fight against J. L. Sullivan. Each incident would probably be the highlight of a less adventurous career.

Much of his life seemed unbelievable even to me, yet Mr Sutherland was able to build the story upon a plethora of factual evidence which had been to hand for years – in the Lowther Estate Office strong room are fifteen crates of letters and papers and many boxes and albums of photographs, quite apart from the usual domestic photograph albums removed from Lowther Castle; all of which had been carefully bundled and put away. Perhaps Uncle Hugh had entertained some hope that his biography would be written, for none of his correspondence appears to have been destroyed (although it was all carefully edited!) and copies were kept of all the letters he wrote. The bundles, too, were all labelled with helpful comments, as if specifically for a biography. All this along with the bric-a-brac of a long, full and adventurous life, culminating with numberless presents large and small, some of great value and some very modest in cost, many very touching, some merely ostentatious, given to them both not only on the occasion of their golden wedding but for their diamond wedding as well.

From all this Mr Sutherland was able to build up an image of my great-uncle about whom this can be said: As long as boxing is tolerated, so long as the British people enjoy coursing, hunting, shooting and racing, not to forget the circus, show jumping and the more mundane world of agricultural shows, sheep-dog trials and hound trails, his name will live on, and I, and I hope my descendants, will be proud to remember not just his extraordinary life and deeds and his apparent lack of interest in the material development of the family interests, but his drive, energy and belief in the popularising and welfare of sport in all its forms.

James Lonsdale

1965

West Ham stadium, 12 October 1931

Lowther, in thy majestic pile are seen

Cathedral pomp and grace in apt accord

With thy baronial castles sterner mien,

Union significant of God’s adored

And charters won and gloried by the sword

Of ancient honour whence thy godly state

Of policy which wise men venerate

And will maintain, if God His help afford.

Hourly the democratic current swells

For airy promises and hopes suborned

The strength of backward looking thoughts is scorned.

Fall if ye must, ye Towers and Pinnacles

With what ye symbolise, authentic story

Will say, ye disappeared with England’s glory.

William Wordsworth

INTRODUCTION

When Hugh Cecil Lowther, 5th Earl of Lonsdale, was born on 25th January 1857, Abraham Lincoln had not yet become President of the United States of America, the second French Empire was in its infancy and Queen Victoria was to be on the throne for another forty-four years. When he died, the Second World War was almost at an end. Russia’s tanks were hammering at the gates of Berlin and the Allied forces were pouring in a flood tide through Germany’s western defences. Within a year the bomb was to be exploded which, in one fearful moment, was to incinerate a city and usher in the atomic age.

Hugh Lonsdale’s life-span covered a period of change unparalleled in the history of the world, but in the middle of the nineteenth century the way of life of the upper classes in Britain could never have seemed more permanent and secure. The rakish extravagance which had typified the Regency era had settled down into the complacency of solid Victorian wealth.

The new industrial age swept away the old feudal system which had united the landowner and his dependants in a common endeavour. Now a great gap yawned between the upper and the lower classes. The royalty-rich squirearchy from whom most of the Victorian aristocracy had sprung had created its own tight, secure little world which had been labelled Society. To be outside Society was to be nothing and no one.

The second Earl of Lonsdale, who was alive when Hugh was born, was very much in Society. His ancient lineage, his high rank and his important political offices, and above all his immense personal fortune made his position secure. He had been Master of the Horse to his close friend George IV. Wearing a vivid red wig in an effort to disguise his age he was to live for another fifteen years after Hugh was born to enjoy his two favourite sports of hunting and entertaining actresses. When he died, in the arms of a well-known opera singer, he was succeeded by his nephew, Hugh Lowther’s father – but for Hugh and his two younger brothers Charles and Lancelot the likelihood of their ever succeeding to the spectacular family fortunes remained remote. The third Earl was still in his fifties and his heir was Hugh’s elder brother, St George, who was only two years the senior. St George had only to marry and produce a son for the younger brother’s chance of inheritance to pass away for ever.

So unconsidered was Hugh’s chance of succession that his father could not be persuaded to bother to educate him properly. Whilst St George was being carefully groomed for a gilded future, Hugh spent most of his time in the stable yard at the family home of Asfordby or running wild in the surrounding countryside.

Yet only ten years after the old second Earl had passed away both Hugh’s father and elder brother were dead.

St. George held the title for six years and they were six years of misery for Hugh. Condemned to make his way in a money-conscious society on an income which in no way matched his extravagant tastes, his resentment of his immensely rich brother became a dominating passion. Earthy, virile and with an unquenchable zest for living, he longed for the limelight in which the introverted, intellectual St George moved so uneasily. Desperately he tried to outdo him and to prove to the world that only in the accident of birth was St George the better man. The effort led him into a series of scandals which caused many of the most desirable doors to be shut in his face and reduced him almost to bankruptcy. At the eleventh hour St George died and Hugh, spurned by Society and hounded by his creditors, became overnight one of the richest men in England.

In addition to his sonorous titles he inherited a kingdom in Cumberland and Westmorland. Lowther Castle was one of the largest houses in the country. There was an agricultural estate upwards of fifty thousand acres and another fifty thousand of common land, over which he owned the sporting and mineral rights. There were the lakes of Windermere and Grasmere and the ruggedly beautiful Haweswater. In West Cumberland he owned the whole town of Whitehaven, the rich coal fields which stretched far out under the Irish Sea, and another family seat, Whitehaven Castle. In London two of the great mansions in Carlton House Terrace, knocked into one, provided him with a Town house. There was another house at Newmarket and two steam yachts lying at anchor at Cowes. There were rich lands in the heart of the hunting country in Rutland and the magnificent hunting box and stables of Barleythorpe.

Above all, from his own coal fields, iron mines and agricultural lands there flowed a prodigious, tax-free income of almost £4,000 a week.

Hugh set about enjoying his good fortune with unsurpassed vigour. Trumpeting like a thirsty bull elephant who suddenly scents water, he cut a swathe through Society – who never quite forgave him for it. His boyhood had made him shy and uneasy with his social equals. His father’s grooms, the tenant farmers and their workers he knew and understood. He covered up his shyness in Society with a flamboyance which, even in the ostentatious age of the Edwardians, people found hard to accept. At the same time his passionate devotion to sport, his sure instinct for fair play and his showman’s love of the spectacular earned him the adulation of the crowds and a reputation as ‘England’s Greatest Sportsman’ which spread far outside these Islands.

His yellow carriages, his colourful entourage and his feudal style of living made him one of the best-known figures of his time. His big cigars, immaculate clothes and ever-fresh gardenia were the delight of cartoonists. His public appearances at sporting events were acclaimed with as much delight as if he had been Royalty. As he drove down the course at Ascot behind the King, his yellow carriages and liveried postillions making the Royal carriages almost drab by comparison; the cheers for ‘Lordy’ were at least as loud and prolonged as they were for the Monarch.

He never grew out of the indiscretions of his early youth, but his involvement with beautiful women and unpopular causes added to rather than detracted from his popularity with the public. He never subscribed to the prudery of an age whose motto might have been ‘It does not matter how you behave so long as you are not found out.’ Instead he nailed his colours to the mast and kept them flying defiantly. In his own often-used phrase, life for him was ‘lovely fun’.

But behind the glittering façade there was sadness. Even before he had inherited, the doctors decreed that his wife Grace could never have a child. Although, through his younger brother Lancelot, the line of succession was secure, Hugh would never admit to it. When taxed by his Trustees about some new extravagance, he would hunch his shoulders and reply, ‘What does it matter. I am the last of the Lowthers.’ It was the same spirit as Lord Cardigan had shown as he prepared to gallop at the head of his Light Brigade into the teeth of the Russian batteries at Balaclava. ‘Here goes the last of the Brudenells.’ Perhaps in Hugh Lonsdale it reflected the same mood of do or die. As the safe world into which he had been born started to crumble about his ears and the noose fashioned by his own extravagance draw tighter and tighter, he did not let his public image suffer by one farthings-worth.

Before he inherited, in a desperate search for money, he had sold his reversion. It had been bought by the estate so that the settled land at Whitehaven and Lowther was managed by Trustees who, in consequence, also controlled the purse-strings. For the whole of the sixty-two years he was the Earl, Hugh fought tooth and nail to extract every penny he could from the Trustees in order to keep up his fantastic scale of living.

His lavish entertainment of the Kaiser and other European royalty, his vast stables of horses, his private orchestra, and even the money he poured into equipping the private battalions he raised to fight in the Boer War and the First World War was only paid for after bitter battles with the Trustees, whom he came to regard as the Great Enemy.

By the time he died the outer defences had been breached. Step by step he had retreated as the lights of his personal empire were snuffed out one by one. Whitehaven Castle was sold, then Barleythorpe. Finally Carlton House Terrace and Lowther had to be closed. Like an old dog fox headed at every turn, he went to earth at Stud House in Rutland, near the scenes of his carefree boyhood. He had outlived all his contemporaries but to the end he preserved his own world of fantasy.

Never quite accepted by a Victorian Society, he became, with the public, a legend in his own lifetime. It was their cheers that he sought more than any other thing. Lord Ancaster once described him as ‘almost an Emperor and not quite a gentleman’. Perhaps it was an epitaph that he would not finally have objected to.

Hugh Lowther, the Yellow Earl, in the garden at Lowther Castle.

PART I

The Victorian

CHAPTER 1

The history of the Lowther family is unique.

Many of the more ancient families of England trace their origins, in one way or another, back to the invasion of William the Conqueror. Not so the Lowthers. Whilst the Conqueror was struggling to establish a beach-head at Hastings, the Lowthers were already ensconced in their wild, mountainous country of Westmorland and Cumberland.

Their ancestors had come over in the Danish longboats, and, having carved out a considerable freeholding for themselves, proceeded to stick to it through thick and thin down the centuries. For over seven hundred years Lowther knight followed Lowther knight in direct succession. From the family archives colourful names gleam through the dust of the centuries: there is Sir Gervase de Lowther who married the beautiful daughter of Lord Ross of Hemlock and, putting duty before beauty, lost his life crusading in the Holy Land; and Sir Hugh, de Lowther who was Attorney General to ‘The Hammer of the Scots’, Edward I. Another Sir Hugh plotted with the Earl of Lancaster to murder Edward II’s effeminate favourite Piers Gaveston, and was later pardoned for his part in the crime by a grateful nation. Yet another Sir Hugh fought at the Battle of Agincourt in the reign of Henry V. Sir Richard de Lowther, High Sheriff of Cumberland and Lord Warden of the West Marches, infuriated Queen Elizabeth by harbouring Mary Queen of Scots and allowing the Catholic Duke of Norfolk to visit her at Carlisle Castle. She had him locked up in the Tower.

For generation after generation the family craft survived the turbulent stream of history. It nearly sank forever when the Lancastrians were defeated in the Wars of the Roses and was again in serious danger when Oliver Cromwell defeated Charles I.

In 1689, however, Sir John Lowther of Lowther backed the right horse. He espoused the cause of William of Orange, securing on his behalf the City of Carlisle and the Counties of Westmorland and Cumberland. Sir John was rewarded, on King William’s accession, by being made Vice-Chamberlain to the Royal Household, a Privy Councillor and, in 1696, was created Baron Lowther of Lowther and Viscount Lowther.

Viscount Lowther’s Hounds leaving Lowther for Fineshade Abbey, Northampton, 1695. This is believed to be the earliest painting of foxhounds in England.

Perhaps no family in England has continued to produce in each generation so exactly the characteristics of the last. Sagacious, courageous in their judgements and loyal to their friends, they have epitomised the strength and endurance of the dalesmen – clinging to what they own and adding to it at every opportunity.

Where England’s great political families point with pride to their record of service in Parliament, none can rival the Lowthers, who count a total of more than a hundred Members of the name of Lowther reaching back to the very beginning of Parliament itself. Some held high office but, for the most part, it was the role of the younger sons to take their seats to protect the Lowther interest rather than to concern themselves with wider causes. ‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friends, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country,’ E.M. Forster once wrote,1 and it is a dictum of which a long succession of Lowthers would not altogether have disapproved.

It was the first Viscount Lowther who transformed the family stronghold at Lowther from a keep into a country house – a rather premature move for a Border Lord with the Scottish rebellions of 1715 and 1745 still to come. In fact the lovely Queen Anne house was destroyed not by siege but by an accidental fire, so that only two unconnected wings remained to be infested by Bonnie Prince Charlie’s raggle-taggle army.

Although the Lowthers as a family played an important part in Border affairs they were never as important as the great Border Barons of the Middle Ages, like the de Cliffords of Appleby Castle, the Dacres of Naworth or the Lucys of Cockermouth. Rather they allied themselves to one or other of their powerful neighbours to maintain a fragile balance of power on which the safety of their lands depended.

In the peaceful years following the ’45 rebellion, the whole picture was dramatically altered. In 1760 Sir James Lowther of Whitehaven on the Cumberland coast discovered that the waste seaboard lands which comprised much of his estate were rich in coal with seams reaching far out under the sea. Even more important, deep under the barren fells there were great deposits of iron-ore and other minerals ready to supply the awakening appetite of industrial Britain.

Whilst the old feudal families remained embattled behind their ramparts, Sir James Lowther and the Industrial Revolution took to each other with passionate fervour. Before he died at the turn of the century, the sleepy little collection of fishing huts which he owned on the Whitehaven inlet had grown into a flourishing industrial town and a sea port which rated third in importance in the whole country.

Sir James never married. Whitehaven was his life and his only love. He had the new town laid out by Adam and built factory chimneys in the shape of his favourite silver candlesticks. Looking over the town he created for himself an imposing home surrounded by parkland, which he called Whitehaven Castle. Born a modest squire, when he died in 1775 he was one of the richest men in the country.

Before Sir James’s death, the honours of the main branch of the family, in the person of Viscount Lonsdale, had become extinct; but two great estates, one at Maulds Meaburn and the other centred round the burnt-out shell of Lowther Hall, remained. On the death of Viscount Lowther the two estates had been inherited by a boy of fourteen – also called Sir James Lowther, but who was to earn his place in the family history under the name of ‘Wicked Jimmy’. The boy had unruly dark hair, smouldering eyes, uncouth manners and a turbulent personality. When at the age of twenty-six he added to his already considerable estates all the West Cumberland lands and the vast wealth of old Sir James, the established aristocracy regarded the whole business as being in the worst possible taste.

‘Wicked Jimmy’, First Earl of Lonsdale (a painting by Hudson).

Ruthless, able and ambitious, the new Sir James Lowther hankered after more and more power. Determined to make a good marriage and spurned by his envious neighbours, he went to a marriage broker, with the help of whose services he secured the hand of the daughter of the Marquis of Bute, having been rejected by the Duke of Marlborough as being nouveau riche and uncouth. Although she made her husband socially more acceptable, the marriage itself was a failure. They had no children and he soon left her to her own devices and consoled himself with his real love, the daughter of one of his tenant farmers. When she died he preserved her body in a glass-lidded coffin, which he left in a cupboard at Maulds Meaburn Hall, so that he could continue to gaze at her beauty.

His tempestuous life was a mixture of arrogant tyranny and real achievement. He spent a fortune improving the harbour at Whitehaven, but he had a Whitehaven shopkeeper who offended him pressed into the Navy and kept at sea for ten years. He bought any land that came on to the market until his estates comprised almost 100,000 acres. He bought the valuable iron-ore deposits at Hodbarrow and Millom which gave him almost a local monopoly in the mining industry, but he never bothered to rebuild Lowther Hall, so that his household eked out a miserable existence in the two smoke-blackened wings.

In politics he showed himself equally greedy for power. At one time, by purchase or political pressure, he controlled, absolutely, nine seats in Parliament, known as ‘Lowther’s Nine-pins’. He put up his secretary as his nominee for Appleby. The secretary eventually became better known than Sir James himself – as William Pitt. The poet Wordsworth’s father was his political agent and was almost ruined through Wicked Jimmy’s pathological objection to paying his salary.

Wicked Jimmy was rewarded for this ambivalent record by being created Baron Lowther of Kendal, Baron Burgh and the first Earl of Lonsdale.

So many stories have been told about him that his name has become a legend throughout the North. De Quincey describes how he used to drive at breakneck speed through the villages of his domain where every door and window was shuttered against his evil eye. In his private park droves of wild horses roamed, whilst his own neglected coach and ungroomed horses exhibited his contempt for appearances. On windy nights when the moon is up, it is said he is still to be heard driving furiously in his coach, while, with streaming manes and thundering hooves, the wild horses gallop after him.

Poor Wicked Jimmy. He died in 1802, unloved and unmourned. Yet he did much to bring prosperity to the west coast of Cumberland through his development of the mining industry. Boycotted by his neighbours and distrusted by his political allies, he nevertheless foresaw the years of prosperity through expanding trade and commerce which lay ahead and used his abilities to bring it about.

On the other hand Wicked Jimmy also nearly brought about the end of the Lowther dynasty he had striven so hard to enrich. His sister, whom he dearly loved, and to whom he wrote some untypically tender letters, was married to Lord Darlington. He had promised her that her son2 should be his heir, so, when the news of his death was known, the young man travelled confidently to Lowther to take possession of his great heritage. It must have been a bitter disappointment to him to discover that, on a whim, Wicked Jimmy had crossed out his name and substituted the name of a distant cousin in Yorkshire, William Lowther, son of the Rev. Sir William Lowther of Swillington. It was altogether a close shave for the Lowther family.

The Governing Families of England give the following description of William Lowther:

‘He seems to have been an amiable man. An amiability not less appreciated from the contrast with his wild predecessor, but he is chiefly remembered as a munificent patron of the arts and the peer who changed Lowther Hall into the magnificent seat styled Lowther Castle. He apparently did not care to struggle after political power as did his predecessor at Lowther ...’

His lack of political ambition must have been greatly pleasing to William Pitt after so many years of dealing with his tempestuous forebear. One can almost sense the relief in the note Pitt wrote to him at the time: ‘I wished to thank you for the note you sent me with an account of Lord Lonsdale’s death, as well as to assure you (what I hope you cannot doubt) how much I partook of the pleasure, which I believe was very generally felt, when the destination of his property was known.’

With the accession of William all the wealth of the Lowthers was gathered back to the main stem, but the relationship was too remote to preserve the title. The joining up of the Yorkshire estates did, however, even further increase the family power in the North. William brought with him such considerable lands of his own that it was said he could walk from the west coast of England to the east without ever setting foot off his own ground.

William was a totally different personality from Wicked Jimmy. Born in the reign of George II he lived on into the first few years of Queen Victoria’s reign. With an income of over £200,000 a year he had the means to indulge his own ideas of a spacious life. In restoring Lowther Hall he did not rebuild the house in its old form. Instead he commissioned Smirke, the fashionable architect of the day, to create a vast pseudo-Gothic castle with huge, impersonal reception rooms, cavernous kitchens and over a hundred bedrooms joined by miles of windswept passageways.

William the Good, First Earl of Lonsdale by the 2nd Creation.

It could never, under any circumstances, be described as a home. Nor was it treated as such by Sir William or his descendants. It was only lived in during the summer months or for short duty visits at other times of the year. As was happening in so many houses, the old furniture was banished to the servants’ quarters and good, solid tables and chairs in light oak were made to furnish the main rooms. Leather-bound books were bought by the hundred to fill the shelves in the library. Wine was imported by the cask from France, and great quantities of linen and damask bought from Ireland. When the work was finished the transformation was complete. Not a trace of the old Lowther Hall remained.

With this majestic pile as proof of their importance, Sir William and his wife now held undisputed sway in the two counties of Westmorland and Cumberland. When, in 1807, George III showed his favour by regranting the title, making Sir William first Earl of Lonsdale of the second creation, their position was impregnable.

William extended his patronage to artists and writers on a generous scale. Hogarth, a local boy from nearby Kendal, showed his gratitude by giving his patron a copy in miniature, painted on ivory, of every picture he painted.3 Wordsworth, the celebrated son of Wicked Jimmy’s impoverished political agent, was now an honoured guest at the Castle. In gratitude to his hostess, Augusta Lonsdale, he wrote in her album:

High born Augusta,

Witness towers and groves,

And thou, wild streams,

That givest the honoured name

Of Lowther to this ancient line.

Bear witness from thy most sacred haunts,

And ye parterres

Which she is pleased and proud to call her own,

Witness how oft upon my noble friend

Mute offerings, tribute from the inward sense

Of admiration and respectful love.

Nor could William escape the fulsome praise of the gratified poet.

Lonsdale, it were unworthy of a guest,

Whose heart with gratitude to thee inclines,

If he should speak of fancy touched of signs

On thy abode harmoniously imprest

Yet be unmoved with wishes to attest

How thy mind and moral frame agreed

Fortitude, and that Christian Charity

Which, filling, consecrates the human breast.

And if the motto on thy scutcheon teach

With truth, that magistracy shows the man,

That secret test thy public course has stood.

As will be owned alike by bad and good

Soon as the measuring of life’s little span

Shall place thy virtues out of envy’s reach.

Creevey, the diarist, who stayed at Lowther in 1827, records his impressions of the household in a less formal way. He wrote to Miss Orde:

I think I am settled here for life. I do not know where to begin and before I do I shall have to end, as Lady Caroline and I are going for an airing and at present I am rather boski after luncheon. At five o’clock yesterday evening I thought I had entered on the most formal house in England, and at half-past six dear Lady Lonsdale and I were going in to dinner arm in arm, three boys of Colonel Lowther pulling with all their might and main at my coat flaps to make me stay and play with them, and in the evening, as we could have no cards, from it being Sunday, Lord Pollington was kind enough to entertain us with his excellent imitations of squeaking pigs, guinea fowl, dialogues between crying children and the devil knows what else besides.

In spite of his efforts at Lowther, however, William’s heart was not really in Westmorland. Leicestershire was his real love and the new sport of foxhunting was his favourite occupation. He devoted at least seven months in the year to it.

The Lowther connection with foxhunting goes back to Henry, Viscount Lowther who owned what was probably the first pack of foxhounds in this country. In William’s time the descendants of the Viscount’s pack were owned by Mr Noel,4 who, with Hugh Meynell of Quorndom Hall in Leicestershire, was one of the pioneers of foxhunting as we know it today.

Sir William bought back Old Noel’s hounds about three years before he inherited the Lowther estates, and at once set about the scientific study of hound breeding. Practically every hound in England today is descended from this famous pack.

In those days hunting the fox with hounds was a very different business from foxhunting in its present form. Much of the Leicestershire countryside, which was the cradle of foxhunting, was undrained and unfenced. A fox, once found, was hunted with slow determination. The owner of the pack and his friends jogged stolidly in pursuit, seldom raising better than a trot, and the hunting of one fox might take the whole day.

In order to hunt, Sir William rented Cottesmore House, where he kennelled his hounds and which eventually gave its name to the pack.

Whilst his miners hacked out the rich seams of coal below the Irish Sea and burrowed deep into the fellside for iron ore, producing for him an ever-increasing avalanche of wealth, he set about the business of running his pack with dedicated zeal. He remained as Master of his own pack for fifty years until his death. By then the breeding of foxhounds had become, largely due to Sir William, an exact science, while the rich and the fashionable all over the country vied with each other in the perfection of their horses and the demonstration of their prowess in the hunting-field.

Even during the summer months William could not bear to be parted from his hounds. When the hunting season ended, he trotted them two hundred miles back again to Lowther. The journey each way lasted just under a month.

For his second son Henry, who shared his father’s love of hunting, he bought Barleythorpe, a hunting box on a princely scale which was to become the hunting headquarters of later generations of Lowthers. Henry also followed in the family tradition, after a period as Colonel of the Life Guards, by entering Parliament as the Member for Westmorland. He was a Member for fifty-five years. The fact that during the whole of that time he never made a speech must stand near to a record. On one occasion a political opponent, maddened beyond endurance at being beaten once again at the hustings by ‘Lowther the Silent’, made an impassioned harangue against him from the platform after the result had been declared. Called upon to make some reply the Colonel mildly remarked, ‘I point, Gentlemen, to the poll,’ and bowing stifly from the waist, withdrew from the field of battle. As Sir James Graham remarked, he was ‘a genuine old Tory of the long-horned kind’.

Barleythorpe. 1910

William’s long reign did more than inculcate a love of hunting in his successors. It also marked the beginning of a new attitude towards the family estates. Lowther Castle remained the seat of their power and wealth, but the real business of living was now centred around Cottesmore and Barleythorpe. A sense of duty took them back to Lowther out of the hunting season, but for the greater part of the year all the fun was to be had in the south. Wicked Jimmy, Sir James of Whitehaven and a long succession of ancestors would definitely not have approved.

William, perhaps because of his benign absenteeism, earned for himself the title of William the Good. He died in 1844 and was succeeded by his eldest son William who by contrast became known as William the Bad.

The second Earl William never went to Lowther if he could possibly avoid it, although in his lifetime the journey was reduced from an arduous three-day stage to a comfortable train journey. He had inherited a love of politics and he brought to it all the family shrewdness. In addition to his almost automatic election as Lord Lieutenant of Cumberland and Westmorland, he held the posts of Master of Horse to George IV, First Lord of the Admiralty, Commissioner for Indian Affairs, Lord of the Treasury, Chief Commissioner for Woods and Forests, Vice President of the Board of Trade and Treasurer to the Navy, Post-Master-General, Lord President of the Council and permanent Chairman of the Metropolitan Roads Commission. He carried out his multifarious duties with almost casual competence but refused to become completely involved in public affairs. He twice refused the Premiership on the grounds that his duties might interfere too seriously with his private life.

William the Bad, Second Earl of Lonsdale. He twice refused the Premiership.

For him London was the only place where life was supportable for any length of time: in spite of his love of hunting, even Leicestershire was too far afield for comfort. From his friend George IV he obtained a lease on two adjoining mansions in Carlton House Terrace which he knocked into one to form his London residence. A great admirer of the Continental way of life, he filled the great rooms with a priceless collection of French furniture collected on his travels abroad. A patron of the opera, he was also a great collector of opera singers whose charms did much to reconcile him to his state of lifelong bachelordom.

Second to opera singers, hunting was his great passion in life. He kept a private pack of hounds and a pack of harriers at one of his houses, Tring Park. His attention to the affairs of State depended in the winter to a large extent on the state of the weather. Before breakfast each morning he dug his heel into a plot of grass, grown for the purpose outside the morning-room window at Carlton House Terrace. If the ground proved soft enough he would catch the first train to Tring, gallop furiously all day after a succession of foxes let out of bags at strategic points, returning in time to take his box at the opera to see what further sport the night might provide. Only when the ground was frozen would he concern himself with official matters.

The life seemed to suit him for, apart from recourse to a red wig, he remained in full possession of all his faculties until he died, at the age of eighty-five, in 1872.

He was succeeded by his nephew, Hugh Lonsdale’s father. Hugh’s father had already inherited Barleythorpe from the Silent Colonel, and he now inherited all the Lowther estates and the great mansion in Carlton House Terrace.

CHAPTER 2

The young Hugh was to know little of his heritage for the first fifteen years of his life. His father Henry, now the third Earl, had never been a favourite of his bachelor uncle, with the result that the family had seldom gone to Lowther and even more seldom to Carlton House Terrace.

Hugh was born on the 25th January 1857 at 21 Wilton Crescent in London and spent most of his childhood at Asfordby, which his father rented, near Melton Mowbray. He was the second son of a family of four boys and two girls.

His father, up to the time of his inheritance, had lived his life in the approved Lowther tradition. After a career in the Life Guards, he had entered Parliament as the Member for West Cumberland. Once elected he retired to Asfordby and devoted himself almost exclusively to the pleasures of the hunting field and the table, his appearances in the House of Commons being almost as rare as his visits to Lowther.

Although he hunted five days a week it did not provide sufficient exercise to keep pace with his huge appetite. So great was his capacity for food that within a few years of his retiring from the Army there was no horse in the country which could carry him. When he eventually died at the age of fifty-eight he weighed twenty-two stone and it took eight men to hoist his coffin to its last resting place in the family mausoleum.

His ideas on the education of his four sons were on the elementary side. When his wife insisted on a tutor for the boys, who were running wild, he appointed Trooper Hall, his old batman in the Life Guards, to the responsibility. Hall’s only qualification seems to have been that he had been the Regimental heavy-weight boxing champion.

Mrs Lowther was a gentle, retiring woman, known affectionately to everyone, including her children, as Pussy. One afternoon she returned home to Asfordby from tea with friends, to find a scene of indescribable excitement on the front lawn. Maids from the upstairs windows shouted shrill encouragement whilst, around an improvised ring amongst the rose beds, stable boys and gardeners, led by the redoubtable Hall, were enthusiastically egging on two blood-spattered devotees of the ‘noble art’.

It consoled her not at all to learn that she had arrived just in time to see her son Hugh knock his much larger opponent to the ground and win a famous victory; nor did she derive any satisfaction from the victim being, in the true David Copperfield tradition, the butcher’s boy who was the local bully and had ‘had it coming to him for a long time’. As a result of this incident, Pussy, for once, put her foot down and the following term the ten-year-old Hugh was sent off to join his elder brother St George at Eton.

The only record of Hugh’s scholastic career is his own claim in later years that he had sung in the choir. At all events his formal education was short-lived. He left Eton at the age of twelve, which was the sum total of his schooling.

The Third Earl of Lonsdale, Hugh’s father

On the other hand, his father was determined that his physical education should not be neglected. To this end he put him in the charge of no less a personage than Jem Mace, the last barefist champion of England, the Pride of the Fancy, and the generally acknowledged father of boxing in the form in which it is known today. Jem Mace was supposed to share his duties with a tutor, which sounds like an amicable husband-and-wife compromise in the Lowther household.

They reckoned, however, without Hugh, who objected strongly to having his hunting and the other country sports interfered with by the necessity of attending schoolroom lessons. One day he lured his French tutor Monsieur Ciro down to the river on the pretext of introducing him to the old English art of catching fish in a casting net. When Monsieur tried his hand at throwing the weighted net across the stream, instead of holding the other end, Hugh took the precaution of surreptitiously anchoring it to one of the big decorative buttons on the back of his father’s coaching coat, considerately lent to Monsieur Ciro because of the extreme cold, with the result that the unfortunate man succeeded also in casting himself into the river.

The joke almost misfired for, entangled in the net and the heavy coat, Monsieur would certainly have drowned if the local miller had not come promptly to his rescue. It was too much for the mild-mannered Frenchman who, the following day, fled back to Paris.

Successive tutors fared no better until finally the good-natured Colonel gave up the uneven struggle, consoling himself no doubt with the thought that his eldest son at least was showing himself to be an apt pupil at Eton.

It was during his only year at Eton that Hugh was taken to his first Derby. It was one of over sixty that he was to attend, so it was appropriate that it should have been one of the most memorable of all time. It was the ‘snowstorm’ Derby of 1867, which, he always used to assure people afterwards, was not run in a snowstorm at all, but in brilliant sunshine. It was the background to the race, however, which really made it so remarkable.

A neighbouring estate to Asfordby was Blankney, which belonged to a close friend of the Lowthers, Harry Chaplin.1 A couple of years earlier, Chaplin, a wealthy and eligible bachelor, had been the victim of an extraordinary scandal which had rocked London Society. He had become engaged to the beautiful Lady Florence Paget. A few days before the fairy-tale wedding was due to take place he had driven his fiancée to the unromantic front door of Marshall and Snelgrove in Oxford Street, where, she said, she had some last-minute shopping to do. Alas, for the course of true love! Whilst Harry waited patiently in his carriage at the front entrance, the beautiful Florrie was making a get-away at the back with his erstwhile friend Lord Hastings, one of the wildest young rake-hells in London. Harry Chaplin took the disaster with dignity. He withdrew to his country estates and dedicated himself to horses and breeding of hounds. In later life Hugh was to describe him as the greatest judge of hounds of all time. Lord Hastings, on the other hand, left no stone unturned to try and blacken the name of the man he had wronged.

It was against this background of Victorian melodrama that the Derby of 1867 was run. Chaplin had entered Hermit, a very likely colt, and it soon became known around the clubs in St James’s Street that Hastings was giving almost any odds anybody wanted against the horse winning. ‘He is backing against Hermit,’ wrote his already disillusioned young wife, ‘as if the colt were already dead.’ Ten days before the race it looked as if the great Hastings gamble would succeed. Hermit, going on a trial gallop, burst a blood vessel, and it was long odds against him running, let alone winning. Chaplin was determined to keep his entry in, but Hermit came into the paddock with a substitute jockey and looking so out of trim that the betting lengthened to a contemptuous 66–1. The result of the race is now history. In the last few strides the gallant Hermit ‘came from nowhere’ to get his nose in front, and win. The result broke Hastings, and within a few years he was dead. Harry Chaplin, however, as in all the best story books, became a Lord himself, and lived happily ever after.

It was a Derby to capture the imagination of a much less devoted horseman than the young Hugh Lowther.

Pussy made one more effort to complete Hugh’s education. A year after her husband inherited the title, she sent him to an expensive finishing school for young gentlemen in Switzerland. With his inbred love of hunting, horses, and the English countryside, it was not a gambit that was likely to succeed. Nor did it.

Within a month of his arrival he gave up the unfamiliar scholastic routine and joined a travelling circus. He stayed with them for a blissfully happy year only returning to England on his eighteenth birthday when he learned that his father was prepared to allow him a private allowance of £1,000 a year.

Henry, Earl of Lonsdale, paid as little attention to his family in adolescence as he had in their school days. No longer able to hunt because of his great weight, his chief ambition for his boys was that they should ride well to hounds. To him, like most of the Lowthers, hunting was a way of life and a religion. Only in the case of St George could he see any sense in Pussy’s ineffective fussing about education. So far as he was concerned the failure of the Swiss experiment only went to show what a waste of time the whole thing was. Switzerland indeed! And in the middle of the hunting season too!

When, after his return, Hugh announced his intention of spending the summer in London the Earl raised no objection. Henry hated London himself but he knew plenty of hunting men who quite enjoyed it – out of the hunting season of course.

Hugh took a small flat in Jermyn Street and set about exploring a strange new world. It must have been hard going at first. Tall, athletic and not conventionally good-looking with his sandy hair and prominent features, he suffered from a shyness which never left him all his life. Most of the young men of his age had already got an intimate circle of friends formed at school or during the holidays. They belonged to the exclusive clubs of Pall Mall and St James’s as their fathers had before them, and they conversed with confident sophistication in the fashionable slang of the day. Hugh had none of these advantages. His father was definitely not in Society. He had made few friends in the short time he had been at Eton and he had a much more intimate knowledge of stable yards than of Mayfair drawing-rooms.

On the other hand the second Earl William, Hugh’s great-uncle, had been one of the leaders in the political world and his glittering soirées and powerful influence were freshly remembered. Soon the extravagantly engraved invitation cards from London’s ever-alert hostesses were falling thickly through the modest letter-box in Jermyn Street.

In the same way it was not long before he collected around him a circle of bachelor friends with tastes similar to his own. His next-door neighbour in Jermyn Street was ‘Chicken’ Hartopp of the 10th Hussars, a bluff giant of six feet five with little money but great charm. Chicken’s size was matched by his thirst and his capacity for hell-raising wherever he went. In his native Ireland he used to drive to meets in a coach into which were piled unlimited quantities of liquor and a brass band, which was apt to turn the whole affair into a carnival. He was just the sort of colourful character that Hugh loved. He found himself at home with the brash, hard-living set of young men who put hunting above all else and regarded the posturings of their less athletic contemporaries with scorn. Most of the grand invitations went unanswered. The less reputable assembly rooms, like the Argyll Rooms2 and 222 Piccadilly3 offered much more amusement.