What changed about English estates (like Downton Abby) that caused them to fail after WWI?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve been watching Downton Abby (still watching… no spoilers!) and one of the subjects that comes up is that many of the large estates are failing and being sold after WWI. But I’m not really clear about what has changed about their situation to cause them to fail.

Before the war, how did the estates make money in the first place? The show mentions tenant farmers. How else did they make money? In the early seasons, the house was very well staffed and they lived quite lavishly. Was all that from the rent paid by tenant farmers?

After the war, what’s different? I assume all the farms are still being rented out and they still have that income. So what changed about the income stream for these estates that caused them to have to be downsized, broken up and sold off?

2

Taxation. First under Lloyd George’s pre-war budget when he was Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer, and then under Labour, the taxation rates on the wealthy skyrocketed, as a conscious policy to redistribute wealth. Death duties were particularly onerous on an estate.

3

Read about the “People’s Budget” introduced by Lloyd George and supported by young Winston Churchill - a “traitor to his class” in the opinion of some of his noble relatives.

It led to a constitutional crisis, as the House of Lords rejected the budget bill the first time it was passed by the Commons in 1909. The King was advised by his government to appoint enough new Lords to pass the measure, but ultimately did not have to, because after a general election the bill passed and the Lords lost their veto over financial bills.

4

You can also add in the loss of investments in Russia shortly after WW1.

Add in the depression, plus the loss of so many of the landed heirs during WW1 and you have a perfect storm.

5

And of course the Earl of Grantham made a bad investment in the Grand Trunk Pacific in Canada. Anyone who followed Canadian railway politics should have known that was a bad investment and diversified. :slight_smile:

6

Right, the Depression affected commodity prices generally, which is what farms produce. And of course investment income from stocks plummets after 1929.

So your income goes down, your taxation goes up, and you may have lost the heir (who was trained in estate management all his life) during the Great War.

7

casdave, how wide-spread was the impact of the loss of Russian investments? I’d heard of it, but had the great landowners heavily invested in Russia?

8

“You can’t get good help these days” was true, as more alternatives to being a servant opened up.

9

The huge loss of life in WWI played a part as well. A lot of the servant class had been cannon fodder, and the few who made it back found that there were 9-5 jobs available to them a class step up, because so many other people had died. Also, many women who had been working as part of the war effort found they had to continue working as there was a shortage of men to marry and support them, and they remained in a lot of their “war effort” jobs, like conducting trains, which paid a lot more than being a housemaid.

Not to mention, many women who had worked as servants before the war, switched to war effort jobs and enjoyed higher pay and independence. Some stayed in those jobs. The ones who did go back to work as servants could demand better pay and conditions.

There was also some relief from slumlording. Slum lords had to fix up places a little bit, and people who owned places a step up from slums had to lower the rent, and now servants could “live out,” and not be forced to be available all the time.

10

You’ll recall that just prior to WW1 there was a huge push by the Czar to modernise. This required huge amounts of capital, and the hardships that this imposed on the population is considered to be one of the myriad causes of the Russian revolution.

One of the reasons that the West interfered so much in the revolution by supporting the white Russians was the financial loss that would be incurred if the Reds won.

http://www.theglobalist.com/1913-2013-russia-botched-entire-century/

That loss of investment is one of the reasons that Russia lagged so far behind the West and led to Stalin imposing his 5 year plans - which in turn effectively starved half the population and in further turn led to Russia being poorly equipped to deal with the German attack in WW2. Russia has still not recovered from loss of capital investment to this day.

http://www.theglobalist.com/1913-2013-russia-botched-entire-century/

I do recall during Glasnost that various outlets discussed how much we should engage with Russia and whether reparation on seized assets should form part of the policy.

11

At another point Grantham suggested they invest with ‘that fellow Ponzi, he gtees an excellent return!’ :slight_smile: But fortunately he was shot down by Matthew.

Besides estate taxes which are mentioned, I recall an episode mentioning the large increase in the servant payroll from pre to post war even though the number of servants had been significantly reduced. As other posts suggested, even if wages didn’t increase very rapidly in Britain post WWI, the relative wages for that kind of work perhaps did. This is still seen today. Sometimes it’s viewed as automatically political to say ‘X people don’t want to do that kind of work anymore’ but it’s often true, or in economic terms you have to offer so much more that the type of job becomes less common. Other episodes dealt with the idea of underinvestment and obsolescence in the basic model of tenant agriculture which were the revenue side of those estates. Or at least it required more of a business mindset for the estates to survive, which Grantham obviously lacked in the show, but was helped out by more commercial minded younger members of the family other estates might have lacked. The latter is the kind of thing which would be hard to discern directly from serious statistics, and more likely to be understood anecdotally, though obviously the one example of this show is just a TV show, albeit a very good one IMO.

12

The estates had already for at least 50-75 years been on life support, even before the war. The main sources of income was agriculture, the method was tenant farming. The rise of the industrial revolution and industrialization had already seen many leave the land and movie to the new Industrial towns. At the same time the British were able to purchase most foods and cash crops more cheaply from their Empire and the US. So, in essence it was a lifestyle already precarious.

By 1914, most of the better off estates tended to get their income from elsewhere, investments, mining or railway rights.

[QUOTE=RivkahChaya]
The huge loss of life in WWI played a part as well. A lot of the servant class had been cannon fodder, and the few who made it back found that there were 9-5 jobs available to them a class step up, because so many other people had died. Also, many women who had been working as part of the war effort found they had to continue working as there was a shortage of men to marry and support them, and they remained in a lot of their “war effort” jobs, like conducting trains, which paid a lot more than being a housemaid.

Not to mention, many women who had worked as servants before the war, switched to war effort jobs and enjoyed higher pay and independence. Some stayed in those jobs. The ones who did go back to work as servants could demand better pay and conditions.

There was also some relief from slumlording. Slum lords had to fix up places a little bit, and people who owned places a step up from slums had to lower the rent, and now servants could “live out,” and not be forced to be available all the time.

[/QUOTE]

Well thats wrong on so many levels.
i) If there is one thing you have to accept about the British aristocracy; they are no cowards or shirkers. Aristocrats died by the truckload in Flanders, France, Palestine, and Mesopotamia. Several long held titles saw most or all male heirs die out. And this repeated in WW2. The largest losses by capita was the upper classes.

ii) Victorian era social reformers on both sides of the Atlantic had opposed women’s work on the factories. However while in the US by the late Victorian period, women had mostly been banished from the workplace, this was still not totally true in the UK. And women did have a small but significant presence in the workplace in 1914, even married women. And post war when the demob happend, there was a surplus of unemployed male labour, and pretty heavy male unemployment and unrest. Post war the British Army had to be called in to keep order in Great Britain and they used units and formations composed of professional soldiers, (a Guard Division was pulled from occupation duty IIRC).

  1. Slums were always a city phenomena and the end of the war only led to greater concentrations of them. Indeed one of the reasons domestic work was prized was that it led to much better and comfortable digs.
13

For a large part of human history owning land was the key indicator of wealth. The more land the better. During the industrial Revolution this stupidity became unsupportable. However, due to the residual wealth as well as the nouveau riche the estate system managed to muddle on for a while.

Making things worse was having an estate as grand as what people had 100 years ago wasn’t good enough. You had to build an even grander house to show how rich you were.

But in any era, maintaining these houses was incredibly costly. The estates were working farms that helped offset some of the costs. But money need to be brought in all the time. Conquer a new colony. Get rich off of canals/railroads/etc.

But this all very shaky. The profit value of farming went way down with the industrial revolution. There were dirt poor farmers in the US with large chunks of land producing wheat with incredible efficiency. Classic estate agriculture couldn’t keep up with that.

Where you going to get new colonies? What was going to make you rich developing something in the countryside?

WWI changed a lot of things. Notions of prestige changed. The rich people who lived in the cities and ignored getting a big house out in the sticks disrupted it all. They didn’t care about old-style status. They created their own.

Throw in the increasing cost and difficulty of obtaining servants, the lack of new sources of income (and in many cases the decline of current sources) made keeping up with the Dejones harder.

Estates also were collateral for loans. (And a lot of families lost their estates when they couldn’t pay them back, regardless of era.) Leveraging your estate’s value for investment money was often smart.

But when enough estates go on the market, the value of your estate drops. You can’t get good loans. In fact, many found themselves underwater. So, give the estate to the creditors and let someone else deal with it.

14

Lots of estate owners invested and were sponsors of industrial concerns. Many had holdings in colonies. Indeed pretty much the only ones which survive to this day are those which did.

15

Weren’t they also getting an income from the village? Or was it just the tenant farmers?

16

Funny, we’ve just been watching Andrew Marr’s The Making of Modern Britain, so I’m all up on Lloyd George etc.

17

That would depend who owned the village properties and on what terms. Of those owned by the estate, some might be tied cottages for the farm workers (and therefore not on commercial rents) or grace-and-favour homes for retired house staff, some might have been let leasehold and only charging ground rent. And in all cases, rising expectations through the 1920s and 30s as to what needed to be done to houses to keep them up to modern standards (plumbing, electricity, roof repairs and all the rest of it) could well mean there wasn’t much if any profit to be made out of whatever hadn’t been sold off freehold anyway.

18

Also too, it was those manors. A family with a decent enterprise might be able to get by after paying the inheritance tax. But owning and supporting a small palace and hundred of acres of grassy garden was different- it made no money, but had a huge valuation put on it for inheritance duties. When I was growing up (60’s) the literature was full of stories about Lords who took advantage of a loophole - make it a public museum and open the mansion one day a year for public tours, to avoid paying the inheritance tax. Stories also included the typical “local lord is evil crook” with broke nobility engaging in nefarious schemes because they could not afford to maintain their estates after inheritance taxes.

AK84 has a good point. even in the mid-to-late 1800s, British nobles were feeling the pinch; those who hadn’t gotten onto the industrialization gravy train were slowly going broke. Agricultural output just wasn’t as lucrative as before. Many of the legendary European marriages to rich Americans (like Churchill’s mother?) were as much as anything marriages of convenience, to gain the financial boost from the American side, while the American family got the prestige of a European title.

19

Most of those huge and costly estates did a deal with HMRC to open to the public. Initially pretty infrequently but later on most of the estate was handed over to The National Trust in lieu of taxes and opened up for most of the year. This is why you can visit Highclere Castle (Downton Abbey) Chatsworth (Pemberly) Castle Howard (Brideshead) and many many more.

I have three within walking distance from my house.

20

See Baumol’s cost disease for why industrialization raised servant’s salaries.