Where Did The Downwardly Mobile Live

Where Bertie Wooster Went Next

Downward mobility is far most interesting than the upward version. Arguably it’s politically more impactful too. While the Jacobin Club in Revolutionary Paris might be the classic example of a group of upwardly aspiring professionals and bourgeois blocked by the old system and channelling their resentment into revolutionary channels, many of the revolutionaries of Russia and China are better described as ‘surplus elite’ scions of the minor aristocracy, with higher expectations from their background and education than society was likely to fulfil. There is no doubt that pressurised classes like small business owners and farmers were powerful elements in populist coalitions like the Fascists of Italy and the Nazis.

Even setting this aside, usually in history there are more people going down the ladder than climbing it. Aristocrats typically had more children, more of whom survived childhood and lived in healthier surroundings – just look at how few relatively nobles or royalty died of the Black Death. Younger sons and grandsons gradually dropped down the social ladder.

We did have a relatively short period of inversion from the late nineteenth century when the birthrate among the aristocracy and the wealthy fell dramatically. This itself gave rise to all sorts of gloomy speculation among the eugenicists, fearing that society was going to be swamped by the faster breeding working classes (famously echoed as late as the 1970s by Sir Keith Joseph, or ‘Sir Sheath’ as the satirical magazine Private Eye then called him commemorating his call for government to encourage contraception among the poor). More recently there seems to be some suggestion now that normal historical trends are reasserting themselves, with the richer having slightly more children

Most of all, however, there is a natural melancholy to decline. And no period for me is more interesting than the great wealth compression between the gilded age of the late nineteenth century and Edwardian period into the twentieth century. What did it feel like, and, most of all, where did these people live once they were exiled from the English country houses “the gardens of Blandings Castle [which] are that original garden from which we are all exiled” as Evelyn Waugh put it.

It’s not easy to read much about this. Academics interested in housing tend to be a worthy lot, and slums and the rise of council housing are the main focus of books covering this area. But all over London, mansion flats and magnificent hotels give some hints about where Bertie Wooster went next.

The whole point of country houses is that they were always an absolute money sink, which could only be maintained at the expense of constant additional wealth accumulation through patronage or advantageous marriages. As the TV series shows, the struggling Granthams in Downton Abbey are actually doing better than many of their contemporaries. This phenomenon wasn’t new, already clear in many of the great homes of Elizabethan England like Bramshill, a pile which never attracted a family wealthy enough to run it in style for more than a couple of generations, and which ended up for a while as the Police Training College. The academic Douglas Allen in his brilliant book The Institutional Revolution argues this was an intentional strategy to bind the aristocracy in loyalty and good behaviour to the monarch. Whether that is the reason, or competitive consumption is integral to human nature, there is a powerful engine here driving wealthy families into distress, and forcing them to throw younger children in particular onto their own devices.

So if you’ve grown up in comfort in a big house, where do you go next? The big cities attracted the wealthy like anyone else. If you could not afford to maintain an establishment yourself, but had no intention of looking after yourself, various forms of mansion flats and residential hotels filled the logical gap. Many of the grand mansion flats we see around London originally had restaurants on the ground floor that would send food up to the rooms above. Room service, cleaning and services like hairdressing would have given at least a ghost of a feeling for the luxury now lost. So long as labour was reasonably cheap, this was an efficient way of providing service -certainly far more than the sprawling and antiquated country houses of the era.

The 1891 census saw 220,000 people living in ‘hotels, boarding houses, lodging houses and inns’, but this would have included a lot of shorter term residents in much more humble places – perhaps 40,000-70,000 would have been longer stay residents, likely to be middle class single people, the retired or commercial travellers.

By the interwar period residential hotels were a significant feature of urban middle-class life, especially London, Bournemouth, Eastbourne, and the major industrial cities. The 1931 census saw about 500,000 people in hotels or boarding houses.

Interwar hotel living was a middle-class lifestyle: social dining rooms, shared lounges, hired orchestras, and communal facilities.

This whole class of people went into decline to the post war period – though as late as the 1970s characters like ‘the Major’ still crop up in Fawlty Towers. Rentier income was shattered by high inflation and taxes and unfortunate patriotic investments in WW1 war bonds. Wages for service jobs increased faster in the post war period than those for middle class professions, making this sort of labour intensive businesses increasingly unviable, and the hotels declined in attractiveness compared to more modern housing as owners tended to lack the money for expensive retro fitting modern conveniences like central heating and improved electrics. Social trends towards privacy, self reliance and concentration on the nuclear family in the post war period played a part too.

The literature of the era gives a flavour for the gradual decline. There are glamorous hotels in the early Agatha Christie books, but by the time of Curtain (written in the 40s though not published until the 70s) the tone had changed dramatically: “Guest homes run by broken-down gentlepeople. They’re full of failures”.

Anthony Powell’s Uncle Giles, clinging grimly onto respectability trying to recover his position with questionable investments and arguments about his fair share of The Trust is a fair example of what Powell calls “the proud, anonymous, secretive race that dwell in residential hotels”.

By the war time period, the literature of the period shows hotel residents as in further decline, with their position disrupted by evacuation and billeting. The narrator’s father Gervase Crouchback in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy has sold his ancestral home for it to be turned into a minor catholic boarding school (with two houses, amusingly named Crouchback and Holy Family). He has retired to rooms in a seaside town, which he shares with other marginal figures struggling to hold on to their rooms in the face of the billeting officer. Agatha Christie’s wartime detective couple Tommy and Tuppence track down German spies in a very similar milieu.

Once the war has passed, the era of this sort of accommodation had gone. Hotels were only one of the casualties of the era. County and indeed Test cricket had been invented during the great flourishing of the rentier era. Counties have been in more or less permanent financial distress once there were no longer large numbers of people happy to pay to watch cricket for three days mid week, and other wealthy amateurs willing to play for nothing in return for enjoying a better changing room than their paid ‘player’ team-mates. In one of the last Miss Marple books, she stumbles across what seems to be a throw back to her youth, Bertrams Hotel, which appears to be a perfectly preserved example of the beautiful Edwardian residential hotel. Never sentimental, nobody is less surprised than Miss Marple when all turns out to be not as it seems.