No detail is overlooked: this is a time when the status-conscious rich will go as far as to measure the height of their footmen – to make sure they’re all the same height. After all, it won’t look good to have two liveried footmen of different heights on either side of a door. Your friends might notice. And comment.
The King leads the way in this obsession with detail; at one point, he ticks off Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough for having a semi-crescent of diamonds in her hair at dinner instead of a proper tiara. Shameful, eh?
At the other end of the scale, the working classes of the era frequently struggle to survive and feed large families on a standard wage of £1 a week or less. For the lower live-in servants, pay is sometimes much less than this. Yet the wealthy and slavish followers of the very latest fashion or trend don’t blink an eyelid at forking out today’s equivalent of £20–30,000 for a first-class return ticket, Southampton to New York, on one of the new transatlantic ocean liners going across the Atlantic to the New World.
At the brand new Ritz hotel in London, opening in 1906 to cater exclusively to the super-rich and their friends, fountains are created which spout only the finest champagne. Ultra-fashionable women think nothing of spending the equivalent of £3,000 on just one hat. It is standard practice to use their husbands’ millions to visit Paris high fashion salons twice a year, ordering dozens of the most exquisite creations of the time from French designer houses like Worth or Doucet and having each dress shipped home, beautifully wrapped, in its own individual trunk (beats a cardboard Tiffany or Gucci box any day, doesn’t it?).
Make no mistake, following on from the sober restraint of the Victorian years, this is a period of completely over-the-top conspicuous consumption for the wealthy. And the only ordinary people who really have a permanent close-up view of all this sumptuous extravagance are, of course, the servants – without TV and radio, many don’t know much about the indulgences and excesses of the rich – though the newspapers of the time chronicle their travels – and their scandals, should they come to light.
Yet in some cases, things have been getting a bit tight financially for the aristocrats with the ‘old’ money. Not all estates are managed or run as well as they should be. Once they could do very nicely thank you by living off the agricultural proceeds of the estate. But not any more: many English aristocrats now find themselves in a situation where they might still be asset-rich in terms of jewels, shares and land, yet there’s very little cash. So how do you find large sums of cash fast if you’re juggling ever increasing debt, unwilling to sell off all or part of your huge estates? Where could you get money? Lots of it?
THE BIG TRADE-OFF: CLASS FOR CASH
Snobbery reigns supreme among the elite. By tradition, they only really want to stick to each other, and merge their aristocratic, high-born families through marriage to the offspring of other high-born toffs.
But money is money and while the aristocracy traditionally rely on primogeniture (the passing on of inheritance, land and title from father to eldest son) for hundreds of years, when pushed they have occasionally married for money outside the elite circle – provided the bride’s dowry is tempting enough. When you’ve got a lot of money and can have whatever you want, why not aim higher?
But with the wind of change blowing through their lives and, in some cases, their fortunes dwindling through higher taxation or poor management, by the late nineteenth century many discover the need to find money to hang on to their estates is becoming quite urgent.
Borrowing more cash is no longer a good option. Until the late 1800s the aristocrats have always been able to borrow huge sums of money quite easily – at extremely favourable rates of interest. Those who chose this route and used the cash to improve their estates are now in trouble: their equity or land values have crashed with the big agricultural slump when food prices plummeted. Then, just like today, the days of cheap, easy borrowing dried up. Even for them. So the temptation to hold their noses and marry into the ‘new’ money families making vast fortunes in trade or industry is overwhelming. And this idea becomes even more compelling when they consider the incredible fortunes that have been made in recent years across the Atlantic Ocean.
Enter the super-wealthy American heiress. The cash-strapped British aristocratic snobs take one look at the enormous dowries of the daughters of families whose millions have been made in the railroads, shipping, land speculation, stock market and banking in America – and buy into the idea of a marriage with an American heiress.
In turn, the wealthy American mothers of beautiful young daughters are desperately keen to buy into the aristocracy – for them, a title and a grand country house in England is the stuff of dreams, the pinnacle of social achievement.
And the snobbish tendency of the ‘old’, inherited money looking down at ‘new’ money from trade or business has not been restricted to these shores. Through the second half of the nineteenth century, a handful of grand, wealthy New York families who live in snooty splendour on inherited money form a tight little ‘upper’ American clique, the country’s social elite.
They’re known as ‘Mrs Astor’s 400’ – the number of wealthy people who can fit into the grand ballroom of the home of New York’s most powerful socialite family, the Astors. The 400 have always been acutely disdainful of outsiders. They hate the idea of their children marrying those who made their fortunes from what they see as the ‘vulgar’ pursuits of trade or moneymaking. But that kind of snobbery is on the wane in America, too. Eventually they too give into the reality – there is far too much new money sloshing around to ignore it – and their children start to marry into it.
So by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century wealthy new-money Americans have become equally serious power players in this ‘age of bling’, spending millions on vast mansions, jewels and lavish entertaining – tens of thousands of dollars are blown on one outfit for a big New York costume party – in many ways aping the style and fashions of wealthy English aristocracy. But with one beady, lingering eye on the one status symbol their money cannot buy: class.
In the years between 1870 and 1914, hundreds of rich American girls are put on display before the English and European aristocrats by their pushy, socially ambitious mothers – hoping to propel them into what could be described as a carefully ‘arranged’ but very grand marriage, where the trade-off for their ‘new’ American cash is a title and a big country estate and a heritage going back centuries. Shedloads of it. An estimated 10 per cent of aristocratic marriages between 1870 and l914 are with brides from the USA.
This ‘Desperately Seeking An English Toff’ system works in some cases. There’s too much money involved for it not to work, and these girls have a wildly romantic notion about marrying an English earl or a duke. But there are huge cultural differences. As a result, some liaisons are unhappy, loveless and occasionally disastrous: wealthy, pampered American girls already used to servants and the latest mod cons like central heating complain endlessly about how chilly and cold the vast, unheated English mansions can be. The very English characteristic of ‘putting up with it’ or being stoic about physical inconvenience or discomfort has never really played well across the Atlantic. And there is a persistent belief among the English aristocracy, that lasts well into the twentieth century, that the only way to heat a room is by a fire – even though the cost of installing the ‘new fangled’ methods of heating their homes is affordable for some.
American social princesses arriving into the English or Scottish countryside are aghast to discover that every time they want a bath in their chilly new stately home, a housemaid has to lug gallons of water up and down stairs if the kitchen is tucked far away in a different part of the enormous house. And, if they are unlucky, their day-to-day relationship with their cash-strapped English aristocratic spouse, often overly concerned with the cares of keeping