My great-great grandfather was a Duke, a fact I thought I’d sneak out there before I got famous, and people accused him of giving me a leg-up.
Rather than giving me any particular rights or regrets (beyond a mild peevishness that the reason I don’t own my own cricket pitch today is down to the second Duke’s uselessness at running things in the 1840s), this has given me a curious understanding of how social mobility works in both directions, and a knowledge of the fragile nature of vanity.
In an age where it has become desirable for progress in public life to demonstrate the lowliness of ones’ own upbringing, having a duke, a stately home and an Eton education on the books comes as something of a disadvantage. I mean, you can’t really plead a tough upbringing when the pictures on your sitting room wall are of a house with 48 bedrooms, even though ‘Call me Dave’ Cameron made a brave shot at it.
Anyway, none of this matters nowadays: the possessions largely went in the huge sale of 1848 (still one of the biggest diasporas of art in history), the title went in 1889 when the third duke died without a son, and the house finally went in 1922, when it was sold off (for £50,000) to become Stowe School. These days, all we have to show for it are a few small pictures and some wonderful old parchment scrolls charting our ancestors’ enviable skill at social climbing.
When I was a younger man, I hid all this background as diligently as I could. Rather than thinking, as I do now, that it is just another part of a fascinating human story, I thought that it would make me seem posh and privileged, two things young men really don’t want to seem. Now that I accept that ‘posh’ means nothing, and that anyone who can put food on their family table is privileged, I am more relaxed about it. Indeed, I have a grudging admiration for the single-minded way my ancestors built it all up over a couple of hundred years (mainly through marrying well and being in the right place at the right time), and then retreated back to their cottages and houses without complaint when it was all lost.
If this background has had any effect on my outlook and politics (note: small ‘p’), it is through an annoying underpinning of the whole thing by a hopelessly liberal sense of residual guilt. In the sale of 1848, it took 38 days for the auctioneer to plough his way through just those contents of the house that were for sale. I am no Karl Marx, but it does strike me as borderline obscene that any family should have this level of possession at a time when child labour, slum housing and destitution were rife. And whilst I have not been a direct beneficiary of the former wealth, indirectly I suppose it has given me a strong sense of where I come from, and the confidence to therefore try to be who I want to be, rather than who I am expected to be.
In an idle moment of sleeplessness, then, this descendant of a once-great house, came up with the following list of what I was, and what I wasn’t, missing:
Things I might have had.
The ability to ride from Buckingham to London on my own land.
Bossing people around generally. (Not a problem; I run a cricket club, and so can still do this.)
Having a slightly patronizing family prayer read out during my attendance at church.
Agreeable paintings by people called Vermeer, Van Dyke or Rubens, hung in agreeable hallways.
Receipts from every commission granted in the British army.
Close associates called Victoria.
Things I have that I wouldn’t have had.
Man hugs.
The Kurdish barber in Midhurst, and his exquisite nose hair removing trick.
The deep understanding that there is absolutely no substitute for Heinz Baked Beans, Cadburys Dairy Milk or McVities Digestive Biscuits.
Guilty secrets to be done in strict privacy, like Abba, Ryanair or wearing a track suit.
Joining the Labour Party aged 18, in an effort to look more interesting, and distract attention from my acne.
Close friends called Trevor.
On which optimistic note, and whatever your aspirations for 2020, I wish you the happiest of happy new years.
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