When using the lavatory in an English country house there are two things of which you may be certain: the seat will be wooden and there will be a faded copy of The English Gentleman by Douglas Sutherland.
We might at this point turn to a subject studied by cloacopapyrologists – will the paper be hard or soft? Jeyes, Bronco, Izal were the leading brands – we had Jeyes at Barmeath. My grandfather and his generation favoured hard and were resistant to change. Uncle Matthew would have used hard and condemned users of soft as sewers. These days only the grandest houses offer a choice.
Douglas Sutherland should be remembered for his terrific 1965 biography of The Earl of Lonsdale, not for his lavatory humour. If you are my age you must have read it but if younger it may have passed you by. It is terrific. Sutherland was a family friend of the Lonsdales but they didn’t seem to mind his exposure of the earl’s peccadillos. Here is a synopsis:
“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 gambling, horses, hunting and boxing rocked the 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 before and after his coronation, a great public benefactor and an unforgettable showman in everything he did. This biography is an elegant and fascinating tribute to one of aristocracy’s greatest eccentrics.”
Christopher,
Your charming foray into the vagaries of the aristocracy’s lavatorial predilections, linked to the ‘Emperor’ in your title, has tickled me to relate (which you might already know) that the King’s Royal Hussars holds a delightful trophy from a 14th Hussars’ (I think) raid on the Emperor Joseph Bonaparte’s baggage train, to whit a silver chamber pot from which the officers drink champagne as a regimental toast, and which is known as ‘The Emperor’.
Anthony
Irish readers may recall the Empress of Austria staying in Co Meath in 1879 and 1880 for the hunting. A silver chamber pot accompanied to the Meet. In my day a grande dame – almost as grand as the Empress – used her horse box. When the floor boards became rotten the horse was blamed.
I once feebly embarked on writing a multi-novel saga featuring families across the 19th and 20th centuries as hunters and explorers pioneered what would become muscular conservation, and industrialism spawned environmentalism. I had in mind your Lonsdale (exploring in the Arctic and a huge donation of artefacts to the Museum of Mankind, ranching in Wyoming, hunting in England and Africa); his friend Frederick Selous (hunting and conservation in Africa); the Mond/Melchett family (from inventing ICI to leading Greenpeace in four generations); and the Scotts (the father in Antarctica, the son into wildfowling, MTBs and wildfowl conservation). And lots of marital and extra-marital excursions all around.
Lonsdale was vivid in my mind because of Shepard Krech’s “A Victorian Earl In the Arctic” (1989). Now I will look at your recommended Douglas Sutherland’s “The Yellow Earl”. A slightly later Lowther/Lonsdale was an early hunting conservationist member of The Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the British Empire (founded in 1903, it morphed into The Fauna and Flora Preservation Society and is now Fauna & Flora, and as distinguished as ever, though no longer associated with the chase).
Alas, I soon discovered I was no John Masters, John Buchan, Nevil Shute or Nicholas Monsarrat and gave up my fiction ambitions. (A post of yours last February chastened me into reading Monsarrat’s “The Kappillan of Malta”, the thought of which had daunted me hitherto. What a smashing book.)