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Presidential Address: English Landed Society in the Twentieth Century: I, Property: Collapse and Survival

The death rattle of the landed order, like the death knell of capitalism, has been clearly heard dozens of times over the last hundred years and more. Yet there is a suspicion that the sounds have been mis-heard misinterpreted, for collapse and decomposition have never followed the symptoms of sickness and crisis. The Churchill family have played their part in crying ‘wolf’. In 1885 the 8th Duke of Marlborough, reflecting on ‘the organised agitation against the present ownership of land’, asserted that ‘were there any effective demand for the purchase of land, half the land of England would be in the market tomorrow’. He had inside information, the Blenheim estate being heavily indebted. A generation later his son, the 9th Duke, having helped stave off disaster by marrying Consuelo Vanderbilt, wrote in his turn to The Times. Under the heading ‘Old Order Doomed’ and the shock of the 1919 Budget, with its ‘confiscatory’ increase in death duties to a rate of 40 per cent on estates of £2 million and over, he stated that ‘[the] fortresses of territorial influence it is proposed to raze in the name of social equality’ and forecast that ‘the new tax must make it impossible for the heirs of these men—[the landed magnates]—to carry on the tradition’. Whether the heirs have carried on the tradition is debatable, but it is indisputable that in 1989 his grandson, now the 11 th Duke, is still seated in Blenheim Palace, surrounded by an estate of 11,500 acres. That may be no more than half the acreage owned by his great-grandfather but it is nevertheless a very large estate, and a principal reason for placing the IIth Duke among the 200 wealthiest people in Britain.