The Lord And The Cowman (10 June 1977)

The recent “sale of the century” at Mentmore reminded me that the 6^th Early of Rosebery, whose death led to the sale, lived for a few years at the since-demolished house known as The Grange, in Buckingham Road, Bletchley.

He had not then succeeded to the title and as heir he went under the name of Lord Dalmeny which was customary in the family.  The earldom is a Scottish one, created in 1703 for Sir Archibald Primrose, of Dalmeny, near Edinburgh, for his efforts to effect the union of Scotland with England, which was finally ratified in 1707.

The Grange estate, when Lord Dalmeny acquired it, in January 1914, consisted of the house, and 52 acres of land reaching from Holne Chase to Newton Road and from Buckingham Road to beyond the Oxford branch railway line, plus 78 contiguous acres along Newton Road.  The 52 acres have now largely become the Poets Estate and the 78 acres are covered by the Whitely Crescent and Newton Road council houses, together with the St Thomas Aquinas RC School.  The vendor was Samuel Waterhouse and the whole lot is said to have cost Lord Dalmeny just £11,300, which would not buy a couple of any of the hundreds of houses which stand there today, and in most cases would not buy even one.

Lord Dalmeny’s father , the 5^th Earl, was a man of several parts.  He left Oxford without a degree, but in 1894 he succeeded Gladstone as Liberal prime minister.

However, his was a very unstable government.  Its leading men did not work together harmoniously, and his imperialist sympathies and ownership of racehorses (his horses won the Derby three times carrying his colours of primrose and rose hoops) made him suspect to many of his fellow Liberals.  His ministry resigned in1895 and he himself left the leadership of the Liberal party the following year, after which he gradually sank almost out of sight as a politician.  But financially he was fortune’s favourite, especially through his marriage to Hannah, daughter of Baron Meyer de Rothschild.  She brought him Mentmore which had been built for her father.  She also brought him most of its treasures.  Yet he preferred to live at his house at Epsom.  Though most famous and popular for his activities on the turf and rather less so for his politics – in respect of which he was created United Kingdom Earl of Midlothian in 1911 – he spent a good deal of time writing biographical and historical works and was a noted literary figure when he died in 1929.

Lord Dalmeny, who was born in 1882, followed in his father’s wake politically and was MP for Midlothian from 1906 to 1910.  As a young man he was a noted cricketer and I believe that he occasionally played at Bletchley Park, possibly with the Whaddon Chase team, though at the moment I cannot lay my hands on my notes on those matters.  Apart from cricket, the Whaddon Hunt was his great and abiding love, and it might well have been the combination of these various interests which caused him to come to Bletchley in 1914 as a handy centre.  Unfortunately, the first world war broke out later that year.  For his part in it he was awarded the DSO and MC.

But Lord Dalmeny was concerned with his Bletchley estate as a farm.  Curious evidence of this was given by Mrs Monica Savage in a recent WI publication.  In this she said that her father came to Bletchley to be cowman to Lord Dalmeny.  She then added:

“After years of hard work, one day Lord Dalmeny accused my father of not looking after the cows properly and said that the quality of the milk was very much below standard.  My father was a very conscientious worker and this riled him so much that he said he’d leave as he wasn’t giving satisfaction.  Of course, we had to come out of the farm cottage and he got a job at the brickworks, digging clay for bricks, which were all handmade in those days.  For this he was paid 6d an hour.

Not long after he started this new job, Lord Dalmeny came and begged him to go back as cowman because he had found out that the cook was skimming the milk and sending it home to her relatives in Ireland.  But my father refused, saying that if Lord Dalmeny could not take his word, then he was not the boss for him!

When the Whaddon Hunt re-started at the end of the first world war Col Sir Selby Lowndes returned to the mastership, but shortly afterwards certain dissensions arose and the upshot was that, to avoid further discord, he resigned.  The hunt was then reorganised.  In 1920, the Earl of Orkney, of Stewkley, undertook the mastership and he was followed in 1923 by Lord Dalmeny who by this time had left Bletchley and was living at Mentmore.

Thus began a mastership and joint mastership – up to 1929 as Lord Dalmeny and thenceforth as the 6^th Lord Rosebery – that lasted right up to the start of the second world war.

In 1944 he disposed of a good deal of property in the Vale of Aylesbury, but I wonder if he ever imagined that some day Mentmore itself would have to go, too.  More than that, I wonder if he ever forgot the rebuff he received from a Bletchley working man back in 1919!