When I was a commercial eel fisherman, in the days when eels were not known to be endangered, one of my lakes was in the grounds of a Queen Anne mansion in Shropshire, where I had to negotiate with the Major. He was the second husband of the woman who owned the estate. I formed the opinion that he was on a temporary contract, which might be renewed if he behaved better than the first husband, who had allegedly sold off some old masters. I’m carefully not presenting any of this as fact, but rather as a mixture of rumour and surmise and chatting with the gamekeeper. Another of my surmises was that he had found being sent off to public school very traumatic. One of the symptoms of this surmised trauma was that when he spoke to me there was very little eye contact because he was constantly kneading his eyeballs with his fists. He once interviewed me in a kitchen with two Agas, seated at one of a pair of vast maple tables, sourced on the estate. I had one of my children with me, and while I was drinking my Nescafe he very kindly tried to find some orange squash for young Sam. Having a cleaning woman with a small child had led him to suppose that the children of the lower orders preferred Corona or Kia-Ora to orange juice, just as their parents preferred Nescafe to coffee. It isn’t easy searching when you are kneading your eyeballs all the while. I eventually helped him out by proposing that my son Sam might, just this once, tolerate some of the freshly squeezed orange juice I had noticed chilling in one of the two Smeg fridges.
The night before, the keeper told me, the Major had kept him up until 3 am searching for a missing invoice for a bag of pheasant food. He tended to skulk in the woods, as keepers do, out of the way of the boss. I too began to avoid the Major, switching off the engine as I coasted past the estate office, but one day he spotted me and jumped out of the shrubbery, bringing me to a reluctant halt.
“D’you know”, he said, “You look just like a guilty schoolboy!”
I looked even more like a guilty schoolboy.
“Don’t be offended,” the Major said. “Actually I find it rather attractive”.
I avoided him even more after that.
Many years later –viz, yesterday - I was reminded by my brother that this house had once been the home of Mad Jack Mytton, a country squire and one-time Tory MP whose escapades might well have struck a chord with some of those young men of Oxford’s Bullingdon Club who have gone on to help to form recent governments. The Bullingdon Club was actually founded sixteen years before Mad Jack Mytton was born and is very much a product of that age. The historian E.P.Thompson believed that the Georgian aristocracy actually had very little function, other than to be seen to be the aristocracy, and that their lives were essentially theatrical performances for the benefit of the lower orders, who saw them in their finery driving in their carriages or hunting foxes, or taking part, as magistrates and judges, in rather more sinister theatrical performances. The private box of the Bateman family at the ‘strawberry gothic’ Shobdon Church in Herefordshire is so magnificent that the entry of the family in their Sunday best by a private entrance must inevitably have upstaged the parson, especially as the rustics knew all the gossip from their sons and daughters working below stairs at the Hall. Mad Jack Mytton was another such aristocrat, rather like the young men described by Siegfried Sassoon in ‘Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man’, men with money but nothing to do, spending all their time foxhunting, reading foxhound stud-books and organising horseraces, until the First World War gave them something else to do.
Mad Jack Mytton was born in 1796, to a family of squires going back 500 years. His father died when Jack was two and he inherited the Hall and an annual income of £10,000 a year from the 132,000- acre family estates in Wales and Shropshire. He was expelled from Westminster School for fighting a master, and then, after three terms, from Harrow. Should have gone to Eton, I hear you say, wondering what his headmaster’s report would have said. Nevertheless he gained entry to Trinity College Cambridge. He took 2000 bottles of port up to the college, but found Cambridge boring and embarked on the Grand Tour. When he returned he had a spell in the 7th Hussars, but eventually resigned after a month or two drinking and gambling in France as part of the army of occupation after the defeat of Napoleon.
When he came into his full inheritance he decided to become a Tory MP, which he achieved by offering voters £10 notes to vote for him, but he found the debates boring and he only lasted in the House of Commons for 30 minutes. Some years later he decided to stand for a rival party, the Whigs. Maybe he was driven more by ambition and a sense of his own importance than by any political conviction, something which still happens. This time, not having paid the voters, he came bottom of the poll.
Mad Jack had his own pack of foxhounds when he was ten, and would hunt in all weathers in a light jacket and linen trousers, although his hunting wardrobe contained 150 pairs of hunting breeches and 700 pairs of handmade hunting boots, 1000 hats and 3000 shirts. In the excitement of the chase he often stripped naked and rode thus even through snowdrifts and rivers in full spate. To be fair, we’ve all done that, haven’t we? He kept 2000 dogs, and his favourite horse, Baronet, had the run of the Hall and spent the evenings in front of the fire with his master, deliberately ambiguously drinking port.
Mad Jack was in the habit of driving his gig at high speed and once decided to see if a horse pulling a carriage could jump over a tollgate. On another occasion he asked his passenger whether he had ever been upset in a gig. The man said he had not and Mytton responded, "What!! What a damn slow fellow you must have been all your life!" He promptly drove the gig up a sloping bank at full speed, tipping himself and his passenger out. He is also said, in 1826, in order to win a bet, to have ridden a horse into the Bedford Hotel opposite the Town Hall in Leamington Spa, up the grand staircase and onto the balcony, from which he jumped, still seated on his horse, over the diners in the restaurant below, and out through the window onto the Parade.
All this was in the eighteenth century, but such eccentricity is not entirely a thing of the past. And indeed politicians who find the idea of holding high office more exciting than the reality of government are not unknown. Even in the twentieth century, in another Hall in that same Shropshire, I was told of a landowner who spent years building a giant siege engine or trebuchet, weighing 30 tons and standing 60 feet high, at the cost of around £10,000. My informant told me he used this massive catapult to fire cattle into the air in a rather nasty variant of clay pigeon shooting. He wasn’t able to tell me if the cattle were alive or dead when they were launched. At the time I wasn’t sure whether to believe this story, although I thought it almost too ridiculous not to be true. As a by-product of researching Mad Jack Mytton I have discovered that the landowner with the trebuchet really did exist, living in a stately Hall in the same Shropshire where P G Wodehouse was also apt to place his eccentric landowners. In this account the landowner is quoted saying he found the trebuchet useful for getting rid of dead animals. I find myself, when not reminded of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, wondering in what sense they were ‘got rid of’, and whether they landed on Major Trebuchet’s own estate or among the neighbours, and whether he ever scored a direct hit. If a dead cow landed on my lawn I would not consider it to have been ‘got rid of’. Rather the opposite.
One thin many such men have in common is that they were sent off to a ‘public’ school at young age. They were wrenched from their homes, parents, pets and siblings and dropped off with only a tuck box for consolation, in a harsh environment where the only female presence among the birching masters was Matron, who was not necessarily a warm or sympathetic person. Here they would cry themselves to sleep at night as quietly as possible, knowing that this sign of weakness invited scorn and bullying . Their solution was often to develop a carapace of unconcern, rather than appear to be cissies or softies. The feminine qualities of the mothers and sisters they were wrenched from (or maybe more often Nanny) became something to be scorned in this Spartan microcosm, where they developed a subculture in which it was cool not to care. Those who did care about anything serious were likely to be called ‘big girls’ blouses’ or ‘girly swots’. The men emerging from these schools were likely to be institutionalised to the extent of being ideally suited to administering the British Empire. If they stayed in Britain on their estates, they had little to do except to engage in those same display rituals identified by E P Thompson – being seen driving their carriages, interspersed with dances, bed-hopping country house weekends, and dressing up in one uniform for grouse and pheasant shooting, and another set of finery for hunting foxes, deer and otters. By these means they impressed the peasantry, and doubtless themselves too, with their power and importance. Mad Jack’s place in his county’s hall of fame is far greater than that of many other sane and serious natives of Shropshire, which has given us many eminent men and women, among them Clive of India, Charles Babbage, the man who originated the concept of the digital programmable computer, Charles ‘I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what he did’ Darwin, and Humphrey ‘ditto’ Kynaston the highwayman, as well as A E Housman and the guitarist with Judas Priest. It says a lot about us Brits that Mad Jack features much more vividly in the iconography of Shropshire than Charles Darwin. There is the Jack Mytton Way, a long distance bridleway for riders, mountain bikers and walkers, running for 116km through South and Mid-Shropshire. A public house is named after him in the village of Hindford, and a hotel, The Mytton and Mermaid, on the River Severn near Atcham, has a bar called Mad Jack’s Bar. He has a horse race named after him, and indeed a racehorse, foaled in 2011, owned and trained by Sean Doyle. (I would not advise placing a bet on this gelding, by the way. His form is not great.) None of the other famous Salopians seem to have pubs or horseraces named after the, much less an annual run on the university campus in Minneapolis.
Men from our public schools made up most of our parliamentarians, at least until the rise of the Labour Party. Many of these MPs would have joined the Bullingdon Club when up at Oxford, where some of them kept their own packs of hounds. The Houses of Parliament, both of which they infested, had and still have some similarities with a royal court, with all the dressing up, ceremonial, Black Rods and Gold Sticks in Waiting, as well as the draughty raucous atmosphere of a public school. The culture of the public schools, it seems, persists there and still pervades the parliamentary atmosphere. Thirty-three of our prime ministers were educated at Eton, Harrow or Westminster schools. David Cameron (Eton and Brasenose) – sneered at by Boris Johnson as a ‘girly swot’ in spite of having inserted himself so fully, as it were, into the rituals of the Bullingdon – dismissed policies to mitigate the greatest existential threat of our times, calling them ‘green crap’. Taking things seriously, if you have been to Eton, is for softies, cissies, the little people.
I started writing this piece to entertain readers who tell me they sometimes find my subject matter depressing. I share the need to insulate oneself from painful feelings. I’m considering whether to stop getting worked up about the environment, to abandon the concerns of the avocado-munching wokerati, and to devote myself to becoming a country eccentric. I plan to make my own gunpowder and use it as a labour-saving way of turning over my garden, blowing it up and seeing where it lands. I might end up commemorated on an inn sign.
Highly entertaining and readable, as always. I did wonder if Time Team's last dig [the preceptory[ was at Jack Mytton's place. Nice part of the world, anyway.
Keep these coming. They're balm for the soul.
Please don't stop writing about the threats we face, people need to know. Thank you though for indulging me with the Jack Mytton story, and the way you linked it to today
Your poor garden! Hope the orchard had it's ears covered! As always a pleasure