A Gathering of Graces – Part One

The Dukes: (from left to right) 1. James Graham, 8th Duke of Montrose; 2. David Manners, 11th Duke of Rutland; 3. John Seymour, 19th Duke of Somerset; 4. Ralph Percy, 12th Duke of Northumberland; 5. Andrew Russell, 15th Duke of Bedford; 6. Edward Fizalan-Howard, 18th Duke of Norfolk; 7. Torquhil Campbell, 18th Duke of Argyll; 8. Maurice FitzGerald, 9th Duke of Leinster; 9. Murray Beauclerk, 14th Duke of St Albans; 10. Arthur Wellesey, 8th Duke of Wellington.

In celebration of its 300th birthday last year, Tatler magazine rounded up some of the UK’s twenty-four surviving Dukes to a lunch in St. James’s, and ten accepted the invitation. Some of the remaining twenty-four Graces were either living abroad or too frail to make the journey. The group who attended was still the largest gathering of dukes since the Coronation of 1953 and until 1975 a quarter of the dukes were all related to each other, through either bloodlines or marriage. They are apparently still thick as thieves – the water served at the luncheon was bottled at the Duke of Marlborough’s estate, Blenheim.

Here is an introduction to those ducal guests and a bit on their family history.

James Graham, 8th Duke of Montrose – date of creation 1707. Other titles include Viscount Dundaff and Lord Aberuthven, Mugdock and Fintrie. The current Duke is also Chief of the Graham clan.

Family Pile: Auchmar, near Loch Lomond.

A look at an 1871 issue of The Academy is enough to sum up the family’s historical importance. It reads in part – Mr. Frascr reports on the highly important muniments belonging to the Duke of Montrose. They include charters from King William the Lion, and subsequent Scottish sovereigns to successive representatives of the family of Graham. The papers relating to the first Marquis of Montrose embrace the correspondence with him of Charles I. and II., Queen Henrietta Maria, Elizabeth Queen of Bohemia, James Duke of York, Prince Rupert, Prince William of Orange, and others. The letters of Charles I., which are nearly all holograph, were written from various places during the Civil War, and show the great difficulties in which the king often found himself. The correspondence of his sister, Elizabeth of Bohemia, is marked by her characteristic wit and vivacity. The papers connected with the trial of Montrose and his companions, the depositions of witnesses concerning his invasion of Scotland, and the battle of Tippermuir in Perthshire; the petitions of the Ecclesiastical Courts for the execution of his imprisoned adherents; the acts and proceedings of the Privy Council and the Committee of Estates to enforce subscription to the Covenant, all throw strong light on the condition of Scotland in those stormy times. There is also an extensive correspondence of the first Duke of Montrose, who was greatly instrumental in accomplishing the Union between Scotland and England. In addition to the Montrose Papers proper, the present duke possesses the Lennox and the Menteith collections, which are scarcely of less historical importance.

Holdings – 8,800 acres valued at around £1 million in 2001.

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David Manners, 11th Duke of Rutland – date of creation 1703. Additional titles: Marquess of Granby and Baron Roos of Belvoir.

Family pile: Belvoir Castle, Leicestershire

History: While the main seat, Belvoir, is a magnificent 365-room pile with an underground railway and £100 million of art, the family also owns Haddon Hall in Derbyshire, widely recognised as one of Britain’s finest medieval and Tudor manor houses. A previous Marquess of Granby (later the third duke) was a popular soldier and helped many of his men with their retirement, hence the number of pubs called the Marquess of Granby. The present castle is the third incarnation of the property. In 1799 the Fifth Duke of Rutland, then aged 21, married 20 year old Elizabeth Howard from Castle Howard in Yorkshire. She said that she would prefer to have a more traditional castle with towers, turrets and battlements, and so in the following thirty years the previous castle was rebuilt to the very fine Gothic Revival Castle that stands there today, complete with a great deal of fine Regency furniture, and a fabulous collection of fine art.

The Humours of Belvoir Castle — or the Morning After”, a March 1st 1799 English caricature depicting the  debauchery that took place to celebrate the 5th Duke’s 21st birthday appears above. Blackwood’s Magazine ran the following piece which tells at that Beau Brumnmell attended – “At Belvoir he was (like one of the family) and at Chevelcy, another seat of the Duke of Rutland’s, his rooms were as sacred as the Duke of York’s, who was a frequent visitor there. On the Duke of Rutland’s coming of age, in 1799, great rejoicings took place at Belvoir, and Brummell was one of the distinguished party there, among whom were the Prince of Wales, the late Duke of Argyll, the Marquis of Lorn, and the other chief fashionable people of the day.” At another time, Brummell, who w
as then in the army, was more than an hour late for a military review. When at last he did arrive, he was dressed not in military dress, but rather in the colors of the Belvoir Hunt. He apologized profusely for any inconvenience caused and explained that he’d been thrown by his horse and had lain, senseless, on the ground for well above an hour. No one was fooled as to where the Beau had been – riding with the Duke of Rutland – but the general in charge of the review was somewhat mollified about this indiscretion when Brummell invited him to Belvoir Castle for dinner that evening. If you’d like to don your pinks and join the duke’s Belvoir Hunt, click here.

Holdings: Ranked 474th in the latest Rich List, he is valued at £115 million. Estates across Leicestershire (12,000 acres), Derbyshire (10,000 acres), Cambridgeshire (4,000 acres) and Lincolnshire (2,000 acres).

 

John Seymour, 19th Duke of Somerset – date of creation 1547. The family pile is located in Maiden Bradley, Somerset, but is being rented out at £50,000 a year. The Duke runs the estate from a smaller house in Devon.

History: He is a descendant of Jane Seymour, Henry VIII’s third wife. The first Duke of Somerset, Edward Seymour, was Jane’s brother. The family owns the fourposter oak bed in which Edward VI is said to have been conceived. To read about the life – and execution – of the first duke, click here.

Holdings: Around 5,000 acres of Somerset, including several villages.

Part Two Coming Soon!

A Hunting We Will Go

Modern day controversy aside, there’s still no more iconic image of the English Gentleman than those like the one shown above – dressed in “pinks” and ready to join the fox hunt or to go riding to hounds. The Duke of Wellington did it, though he wore a light blue jacket, and the present Duke of Rutland is known for his Belvoir Hunt. But what, in this day and age, is the actual cost of kitting oneself out for the hunt?

 Plain cream silk stock – £35.00

Frock style hungting coat  £430.00

Bespoke moleskin breeches £165.00

Bespoke hunting cap £275.00

Hunting whip £45.00

Silver hunting horn £698.00      

Hunting boots approximately £450.00

               Saddle approximately £1,000.00

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
A decent mount approximately £5,000.00

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Total approximate cost – £8,098.00
Or $12,944.37, excluding shirt, gloves, socks, bridle, spurs, hounds, rifle or flask
 

Those Fabulous Phaetons – Part Two

The area in and around Long Acre in London was noted for it’s many coach builders, who offered standard coach designs and could also make customized carriages to suit any need or taste. Rudolph Ackermann, most famous for his “Repository,” designed many coaches for the aristocracy. The delivery of a finished coach happened long after its initial order had been placed, as there many firms involved in the construction and outfitting of each. No one firm undertook all phases of the process. There were the Body Makers who made the body and panels, Carriage Makers who built the under-carriage, Blacksmiths who did all the iron work, Wheelwrights and Curriers, who fitted the seats and all leather parts. Finally, Painters attended to the coach bodies and heraldic designs upon the doors and the Trimmers fitted up the interior with lace edgings for pockets, tassel cords, hammer cloths and window blinds. Quality work produced by skilled craftsmen took time – but those Fabulous Phaetons were well worth the wait.

Charles Dickens gives us details of the process is All the Year Round:

The coachmaker’s wood-loft contains oak, ash, and elm, from trees which have lain a year after falling, and which, after I.-mis; cut into planks of various thicknesses, must remain unused as many years as they are inches thick. A certain class of carriage-builders use green wood of any quality, relying on paint to cover all defects, not expecting or caring to see any customer twice. There are some advertising fabricators of diminutive Broughams who are especially to be avoided.

Besides European woods, there is also a large demand for mahogany and knee-wood from the Gulf of Mexico, Quebec pine, birch and ash from. Canada, tulip-wood and hickory from the United States. These, for the most part, are cut ready for use by steam saws before going into the hands of the coachbuilder.

The first step for the construction of, say a Brougham, is to make a chalk drawing on a brick wall, of the same size. On this design depends the style of the carriage. Some builders are happy or unhappy in designing novelties; others have a traditional design, a certain characteristic outline, from which they will on no consideration depart. The next step is to make patterns of the various parts. In first-class factories, each skilled workman has been apprenticed to, and follows only one branch of, the trade. The leading workmen in wood are body-makers, carriagebuilders, wheelers, and joiners—all highly skilled artisans, as may be judged from the fact that a chest of their tools is worth as much as thirty pounds.


The framework is sawn out of English oak. The pieces, when cut by the band-saws, are worked up, rabbeted, and grooved to receive the panels, and thus a skeleton is raised ready for the smith and fitter, who, taking mild steel or homogenous iron, forge and fit a stiff plate along the inside cart-bottom framework, following the various curves, and bolted on so as to form a sort of backbone to the carriage, which, takes the place of the perch:—universally the foundation of four-wheeled carriages before the general adoption of iron and steel.


The frame is then covered with thin panels of mahogany, blocked, canvased, and the whole rounded off. After a few coats of priming, the upper part is covered with the skin of an ox, pulled over wet. This tightens itself in drying, and makes the whole construction as taut as a drum-head, the joints impervious to rain, and unaffected by the extremes of heat or cold. Meanwhile the “carriage-maker,” the technical name of the artisan who makes the underworks, arranges the parts to which the springs and axles are bolted, so that the body may hang square and turn evenly with the horses, on the fore-carriage. The coachsmith and spring-maker have also been at work arranging the springs, the length and strength of which must be nicely calculated to the weight estimated to be carried. The ends of these springs are filled with india-rubber, to make the carriage run lightly and softly.



McNaught and Co., Worcester


Though from a much earlier date, Samuel Pepys records a visit to his coachmaker in his Diary: “I to my coachmaker’s, and there vexed to see nothing yet done to my coach, at three in the afternoon; but I set it in doing, and stood by till eight at night, and saw the painter varnish it, which is pretty to see how every doing it over do make it more and more yellow: and it dries as fast in the sun as it can be laid on almost; and most coaches are, now-a-days, done so, and it is very pretty when laid on well, and not too pale, as some are, even to show the silver. Here I did make the workmen drink, and saw my coach cleaned and oiled; and staying among poor people there in the alley, did hear them call their fat child Punch, which pleased me mightily, that word being become a word of common use for all that is thick and short. At night home, and there find my wife hath been making herself clean against tomorrow; and late as it was, I did send my coachman and horses to fetch home the coach to-night, and so we to supper, myself most weary with walking and standing so much, to see all things fine against to-morrow, and so to bed.”



The Coachmaker Pub
88 Marylebone Lane, London


And in closing, Dear Reader, you will not be too surprised to find that, yet again, the fates have brought us to another encounter with the Duke of Wellington with this passage from All the Year Round – “So recently as 1837 a . . . scientific book on pleasure carriages was published by Mr. Adams, then a coachbuilder, since a distinguished mechanical engineer, and he gives no hint of the coming carriage reform. Mr. Adams made an early display of his ingenuity by building a carriage now only remembered in connexion with the great Duke of Wellington, who drove one to the last, the Equirotal, which, in theory, combined the advantage of a two-wheeled and a four-wheeled carriage, the forepart and wheels being connected with the hind body by a hinge or joint, so that no matter how the horses turned, the driver always had them square before him; a great advantage. It was also, at the cost of something under five hundred pounds, convertible into a series of vehicles. Complete, it was a landau, holding four inside, besides the servants’ hind dickey; disunited, it formed at will a Stanhope gig, a cabriolet, or a curricle. In spite of the example of the Iron Duke, and the eloquent explanations of the inventor, the public, either not caring for such a combination, or not willing to pay the price, never took to the Equirotal.”



The Duke of Wellington’s Equirotal
carriage pictured lower left



In The Garden with Kristine

The beginnings of my garden lay in a butterfly seminar I attended, at which I bought rather a lot of plants that were meant to feed and attract the winged creatures. I had an entire, almost empty backyard at my disposal, with only a lawn, a fence and a few palm trees to work with. As if it weren’t bad enough that I live in hot and humid Florida, I also live on a Cape with sandy soil, coral rock and more roots than you can shake a stick at. What these are the roots to, I’ve still to discover. So the first thing I had to do was rent a sod cutter and begin fashioning beds. This done, I had to dig, which returns us to the rocks and roots. If it were just a matter of digging a hole in soil, the job would be a breeze. But, it’s a case of digging a bit and then tackling the roots you’ve uncovered. You must either cut through them or attempt to pull them out of the ground. These are not just any roots – they’re downright primordial and I’m convinced that there’s some poor person in China, sitting in their provincial garden in amazement as they watch their trees being inexplicably pulled backwards into the ground as I yank on the roots in my garden at the opposite Pole.

However, I’ve finally gotten everything planted (pant, pant, pant) and the beds are beginning to fill out. Here are some “before and after” photos:

And now . . . .

Now that I’ve filled everything in, it’s time to mulch. But things are coming along nicely, if I do say so myself, and are actually starting to flower.
I’ve had the gardenia, above, for two years in a pot and it’s never bloomed, so you can imagine my joy when it finally flowered this year. So, you ask – and well you might – what about the butterflies? I’m happy to say that I’ve got caterpillars of all kinds –
The caterpillars completely decimate the leaves on the milkweed, stripping it bare, and then attach themselves to the fence and create cocoons

A few days later, they emerge as beautiful Monarch butterflies. Here is one newly born with the remnants of his cocoon still attached to his wing.
I now have Monarch, and other, butterflies galore! They flit about the garden, and my person, all day long. You should know that I didn’t set out to take the butterfly photos below – they simply got in my way as I was taking the flower photos – success!

Those in colder climates, who are already feeling winter’s weather, might be thinking that it’s a bit odd for me to be blogging about a summer garden in December. You should know that I finished this post by adding the latest photos on November 22 – it was still in the 80’s.

Favorite UK Christmas Movies

As far as we’re concerned, any time is a good time to steep oneself in all things British, but Christmas is a particularly grand time to do so. While the US has produced many more, and more recent, Christmas movies, we thought we’d share some of our favorites from across the pond with you.

Scrooge (UK) or A Christmas Carol (US) – The 1951 Alastair Sim version remains the best version of Charles Dickens’s yuletide tale. The film also features Kathleen Harrison as Mrs. Dilber, Scrooge’s charwoman, and George Cole as a young Scrooge. Hermoine Baddeley plays Mrs. Cratchit. Now a Christmas staple, it was slated to premiere stateside at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall, but theatre management thought the film was too grim and somber and did not possess enough family entertainment value to warrant an engagement at the Music Hall. The fact that it was filmed in black and white gives a period feel. The film stands out because of its perfect balance of dark and light, which is what Dickens intended in his ghost story of misery, terror, loneliness and redemption, all serving to draw the viewer into the authentically bleak world of London during the early Industrial Revolution. You can buy it here.

Of course, one feels honour bound to now mention Blackadder’s Christmas Carol.

Leave it to the Blackadder crew to put their own spin on the Christmas classic. In this version, Scrooge is the nicest and most generous man going. Until the spirit of Christmas shows him the future and shows Scrooge that his goodness will play havoc upon his descendents, who will wind up as slaves. Scrooge turns mean and soon manages to offend everyone, including Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. A website called
Black Adder Hall sums up the episode thusly: “Dickens’ classic tale of kindness, truth and virtue is completely mucked up and ruined by having a member of the Blackadder family involved. Stuffed with deeply horrid people (many of whom are gigantically fat) and groaning with cartloads of seasonal bottom jokes, it manages to squeeze in not only a Victorian Black Adder but also his famous Elizabethan, Regency and Space Age relatives into a huge pie of entertainment that will satisfy all but the most discriminating viewers.”

Love Actually – This feel-good movie follows the lives of eight couples in London during a frantic month before Christmas. Though vastly different, their stories are interwoven in love, lust, and luck. Everywhere you look, love is causing chaos. From the new bachelor Prime Minister who falls in love 30 seconds after entering Downing Street, to a loser sandwich delivery guy who doesn‘t have a hope with the girls in the UK, so heads for Wisconsin; from a jilted writer who escapes to the south of France to nurse his broken heart to an aging rock star trying to make a comeback at any price; from a bride having problems with her husband‘s best man to a married woman having trouble with her husband; from a schoolboy with a crush on the prettiest girl in the school to his architect step–father with a crush on Claudia Schiffer. These London lives and loves collide, mingle and finally climax on Christmas Eve with romantic, poignant and funny consequences for all. That’s really all the plot line you need since the film stars Alan Rickman, Rowan Atkinson, Hugh Grant and Colin Firth and Emma Thompson. Ho, ho, ho.

Hope and Glory – The following well written synopsis is from a website called Rotten Tomatoes – “John Boorman’s 1987 epic written and directed by John Boorman (Deliverance, The General) serves as a picaresque and semi-autobiographical remembrance of a boy’s coming of age during the Second World War. Exhibiting a defiant and humorous take on life during the London blitz, the family of the young boy at the center of the story (Sebastian Rice-Edwards) is a close-knit and resilient bunch, undeterred in the face of the war and reveling in each other even as they hide from the incessant bombing. To be sure, there are some poignant moments in this childhood reminiscence. The boy’s mother (Sarah Miles) serves as a strong influence in the boy’s life as she leads her family through this tumultuous time. The majestic sweep of the film is contrasted with so many comic moments as the people in town go about the mundane details of their daily lives yet also engage in the most absurd rituals in dealing with the onslaught of German artillery, from taking the air raids for granted to wearing gas masks at school. Boorman doesn’t dwell on the horrors of war; instead he celebrates the richness and resilience of the people he remembers so fondly. An adventurous and nostalgic slice of life, Hope and Glory is a superb and memorable film.” Hope and Glory is worth watching for sheer atmosphere and period detail alone. The scene where the family and their guests are gathered around the wireless in order to hear the King’s Christmas speech and are urging the monarch past each stammer is priceless.  

Bridget Jones’s Diary –  Yes, I know we watch this one all year round, but at Christmas we’ll pay extra attention to Colin Firth’s sweaters. Go on . . . put on your comfy pj’s and I’ll make the cocoa . . . . right then, pop in the disk . . . . Jeez, I can’t wait till the fight scene – “Shall I bring my dueling pistol or sword?” too funny!  . . . Ready? It all began on New Years day, in my 32nd year of being single. Once again I found myself on my own and going t
o my mother’s annual turkey curry buffet. Every year she tries to fix me up with some bushy-haired, middle-aged bore and I feared this year would be no exception
. . . . .

Merry Christmas Mr. Bean – O . . M . . . G . . . have you ever seen anything as funny as Mr. Bean’s turkey!? Okay, we’re cheating by including these as they aren’t full length movies, they’re episodes, but they’re hysterical. You can watch the bit with the turkey here and a bit where Mr. Bean goes Christmas shopping here. Keep an eye out for Teddy!

Have we missed any of your favourite Yuletide flicks? Suggestions? Let us know.