Terence Dooley, Christian Noack (NUIM)

Terence A. Dooley (National University of Ireland Maynooth) Christian Noack (University of Amsterdam) ‘From aristocratic past to public heritage: A comparative case study of Russian and Irish country houses since the revolutions.’ Introduction ‘The storm’, the final chapter of Priscilla Roosevelt’s pioneering study on the Russian estate, begins with speculation on how the country’s stately homes might look today if noble culture in 1917 had not been ‘so savagely put to death.’1 The picture she evokes bears many resemblances to the situation in England and Ireland in the present: ‘… there would certainly be fewer grand estate houses than in 1916, their maintenance perhaps financed by paying guests or reproductions of Ostankino treasures or Yusupov porcelain… many of Russia’s manor houses, as elsewhere, would undoubtedly have disintegrated, been sold and converted to other uses, or razed to make way for housing developments…’2 To date, the bulk of comparative research on Russian estates has focused on England, rather than on Ireland. John Randolph, for example, has devoted a long review essay to Roosevelt’s Country Estate and Peter Mandler’s seminal study on the Rise and Fall of the Stately Home. Randolph’s starting point is the obvious contrast with the situation in England where ‘two million members swell the ranks of the English country house’s defending army, the might National Trust’, while ‘Russia’s humiliated ruins can only echo Chaadaev’s famous judgement: “We do not even have homes”.’3 Arguably, a comparison of the Russian and Irish cases might be just as instructive, if not more so. In Ireland, an aristocratic culture, largely perceived as English and alien, lost its hegemonic position between 1916 and 1923 during a period of socio-political upheaval and civil war. This was contemporaneous with the decline of Russian gentry culture. As we will demonstrate in our paper, much of the built heritage, most particularly in the form of the country house, was lost and in the decades which followed a negative political and public attitude towards big houses prevailed. The splendour in which some houses present themselves today is somewhat misleading; in the Irish case, for example, it has been spawned by years of the so-called Celtic Tiger and a reappraisal of their heritage position within the national patrimony. As to the Russian case, Randolph, based on Mandler’s recommendation to study heritage making in the longue durée, had already speculated about a possible continuation of ‘beautiful [estate] life’ under Soviet conditions after 1917. We will try to demonstrate that elements of the nobility’s cultural arcadia indeed survived the burning of houses during the revolutions and the civil war. 1 Priscilla Roosevelt: Life on the Russian Country Estate: A Social and Cultural History (New Haven and London, 1995) p. 330. 2 Roosevelt, Country Estate, p. 329. 3 John Randolph, “The Old Mansion: Revisiting the History of the Russian Country Estate”, Kritika 1,4 (2000), pp. 729-749, quotes pp. 729-730. 1 Subsequently the physical structures of the manor houses were preserved partly for practical purposes, and partly because of a reinterpretation of Russian culture during the Soviet period.4 The Irish case: an introduction.5 In July 2003, the then Minister for Education and Science, Noel Dempsey TD [Fianna Fáil], was happy to tell his audience in Trim Castle, county Meath: The built heritage in Ireland is a fundamental and treasured part of our national identity. It encapsulates historic linkages within and beyond our shores, and illustrates a strong sense of our identity within a common European and, indeed, a broader global inheritance.6 But in fact it was only at the turn of the 21st century that Irish politicians had, in general, become comfortable with the idea that country houses should be regarded as part of the Irish national patrimony. The aim of the first part of this paper is to demonstrate how older memories and traditional nationalist perceptions had to fade before country houses in Ireland could become popular visitor centres. The section which follow examine the origins of these perceptions, discuss how they impacted negatively on government policy towards the preservation of country houses in the immediate post-independence period, and finally explore the confluence of factors which over the last few decades have changed these perceptions so that the country house in Ireland is now less perceived as a symbol of colonial oppression and more as an important aspect of Ireland’s built heritage. In Ireland the reasons for the decline of the country house, or ‘big house’ (a term that ambiguously embodies deference and alienation), had mostly to do with the changing socio-political and economic circumstances of Irish landlords from the late 1870s as shrinking estates, vanishing incomes (first rental and then investment) and the growth of democracy coincided with the extraordinary upheavals of the extended Land War from the late 1870s, the Great War of 1914-18, the Irish revolution of 1916-23, and the worldwide economic depression that followed, not to mention more personal reasons of family misfortune.7 In the midst of all of this there was another phenomenon in this decline: the reinvention of the Irish nation from the late nineteenth century and the role it played in fostering political and popular resentment towards country houses in independent Ireland.8 While in Europe, aristocratic mansions, chateaux, Schlösser and villas were all victims of political destruction at different times, by the twentieth century 4 Randolph, “Old mansion”, pp. 747-749. 5 Much of what follows in this discussion of Ireland is a translation of Terence Dooley, ‘National patrimony and political perceptions of the Irish country house in post-independence Ireland’ in Terence Dooley (ed.), Ireland’s polemical past: views of Irish history in honour of R.V. Comerford (Dublin, 2010), pp. 192-212; for a wider discussion on the reasons for the fall of the Irish landed class, see Terence Dooley, The decline of the Big House in Ireland: a Study of Irish Landed Families, 1860-1960 (Dublin, 2001); also Terence Dooley and Christopher Ridgway (eds.), The Irish country house: its past, present and future (Dublin, 2010). 6 www.education.ie [1 Nov. 2007]. 7 Dooley, The Decline of the Big House. 8 On the subject of inventing the nation see R.V. Comerford’s magisterial Ireland (London and New York, 2003). 2 there was more of a sense that they could be regarded ‘as national rather than specifically aristocratic property’ than was the case in post-independence Ireland, where there was a widely held perception amongst politicians (and the wider public) that country houses were (former) bastions of alien power built upon a feudal rackrenting economy and with this perception came all the attendant consequences that threatened their survival.9 Land wars and revolution, 1879-1923 The general case stated is that for Irish nationalists of the late nineteenth century, country houses became the physical representations in their locales of a landlord system that was despised for social, economic and political reasons. This had not always been the case. The Young Irelander, Thomas Davis (1814-45), for example, seems to have had little difficulty in appreciating the aesthetic qualities of country houses and their picturesque surroundings. When extolling the natural beauty of the Munster Blackwater Valley, Davis wrote: ‘There is every combination that can be produced by the elements that enter into the picturesque: rocks, verdant slopes with the triumphs of art superadded, and made visible in magnificent houses and beautiful villas, with their decorated lawns and pleasure-grounds’.10 As late as 1882 a radical separatist and despiser of landlordism, John Devoy, could still praise the duke of Leinster’s ‘handsome seat, called Carton, with its beautiful grounds’ and write of Lismore: ‘it ill behoves us to pass from the place without paying a tribute to the general air of comfort that pervades …’11 However, as the Land War intensified so did violent anti-landlord rhetoric that portended what lay ahead for country houses. This rhetoric was successful in creating the perception that landlords were the initiators of Ireland’s social, economic and political problems and those who practised this rhetoric - whether in speech or print - were purposeful in their intent to alienate the landlord class from the wider nationalist community. Periodicals and the emerging popular literature represented landlords as ‘territorial monsters’,12 or as ‘absentee, rack-renting, depopulating … making … laws in a foreign parliament for their miserable serfs at home’.13 They were charged with ‘Celtic depopulation’ and the spoliation of the ‘Celtic fatherland’, a reflection of the fact that since the 1840s the Celt had become synonymous with a Gaelic Ireland that predated the plantations.14 By the time Michael Davitt (1846-1906), founder of the Land League, published his version of its story in The Fall of Feudalism (1904), the growth of Irish nationalism and the emergence of the Irish Ireland movement from the 1880s had witnessed the re-imagination of the Irish nation as exclusively nationalist, Gaelic and catholic, so there was no room for landlords in the national collectivity.15 The essential point in all of this is that from the Land War era nationalists from all spheres of Irish society perpetuated the stereotypical representation of Irish landlords as alien oppressors more widely than before and from that emerged the perception that the 9 Peter Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (New Haven and London, 1997), p. 3. 10 Thomas Davis, Literary and Historical Essays (1846), p. 215; quoted in Comerford, Ireland, p. 240. 11 John Devoy, The Land of Eire (New York, 1882), pp 50, 102.

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