A Silver-Plated Spoon!

Our book today is A Silver-Plated Spoon, the sparkling 1959 memoir by John Ian Russell, who in 1953 became, somewhat late in life, the 13th Duke of Bedford and the master of spectacular Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire. It was an amazing ascension – the family has occupied the place for four centuries – but Russell was hardly expecting it; he first found out about his ducal identity as a boy, from one of his father’s maids. His father, Hastings Russell, was a genuinely fascinating man (for good or ill, most of the Bedford men have been genuinely fascinating), died suddenly in 1953 (our author always maintained he shot himself, but the coroner said the incident was an accident). Suddenly, young Ian was next in line to inherit the dukedom and was duly summoned to Woburn Abbey to meet with his dour, disapproving grandfather:

Square, bulky, medium height, grey-haired, he was gruff and formal. I had arrived all eager to make an impression on this formidable forbear, but the attempt fell flat from the start. He had a curious habit of always looking down when he talked and a disconcerting way of deadening every conversational gambit. It was either “Indeed”. or “Quite”, or just silence, rather like playing tennis and having the other person hitting the ball into the net the whole time. There was no grace of manner, no welcome, no attempt to exert any charm at all to the young fellow who, in all likelihood, would one day bear his title. The subject of my father never came up and he clearly was not very interested in me. It was the most formal and deadening interview I had ever experienced, the fore-runner of many such. After a few minutes silence fell and we went in to lunch.

These meetings were awkward because Russell’s father and grandfather had taken extraordinary legal measures to keep the customary Bedford incomes from reaching him, considering him a feckless layabout. This naturally produced some bitter reactions on the part of the grandson, and some bitter letter-exchanges – some of which are reproduced in A Silver-Plated Spoon with amazing frankness. This is laundry-airing as only the very rich or the very poor ever do it

You say [Russell writes at one point to his father] that you do not see that an unearned income should be received by anyone who does not spend it wisely to perform some real service to the community and you mention that you and grandfather have done. You do not mention however that at my age both you and, I think, grandfather enjoyed an enormously greater income than I have ever had which you both received as a matter of course. At my age had grandfather or you completed any social service? had you commence to do any social service? I do not think so and you both had large incomes, incomes which went much further in those days than they do today. I quite appreciate that both you and grandfather give a lot fo time to social service today but you are both rich men, you have huge unearned incomes from the money and property handed down by generations of Russells so that you are free from the worry of having to find enough money to live, for food, for clothe and for the hundred and one essentials of life.

When he came into his inheritance at last, the Duke brought some novel – even iconoclastic – ideas to his new station, foremost being that he opened Woburn Abbey to the public and took the first tentative steps toward running it as a business, a move that garnered him a great deal of withering scorn from some of his fellow noblemen (most of whom later imitated it). All the most interesting and entertaining parts of A Silver-Plated Spoon (and its much later follow-up, How to Run a Stately Home) center around this transformation of a remote and walled private keep (a place that first struck young Russell, quite accurately, as “somehow not part of this world at all”) into a beloved vacation-day destination:

That first year we had 181,000 visitors, far more than my trustees or indeed anybody else thought we could possibly attract. All the hard work had paid off. By putting ourselves out to make people feel welcome, and by providing the sort of attractions that people look for on a free day, we had jumped straight into the front rank of the stately homes business. Only the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth was doing better than we were, and he had years of experience and organization behind him.

The Duke’s puckish humor is never far from the proceedings either, as when he records the bumps along the way to “the front ranks of the stately homes business”:

The only other untoward incident during the first week occurred when a man came up to Lydia and put sixpence in her hand as tip, saying, “That’s for you, ducks.” My wife, who knew a piece of bread and butter when she saw it, did a grateful bob and said, “Thank you, sir.”

The 13th Duke died in 2002 and was succeeded by his son Robin, a jovial, wonderful man, an avid book-shopper in Boston during his years at Harvard, and one of the most genuine and eager listeners in the world (when a friend of his told him he was as “hungry for stories” as Chaucer, he responded, “I could not conceive of a higher compliment”). He died tragically young, but the Bedfords go on at Woburn Abbey, and in many ways, A Silver-Plated Spoon records the family’s crucial modern-day turning point. And it’s delightful reading in the bargain, as you’d expect of a world-famous good host.