‘An Exuberant Catalogue of Dreams’, by Clive Aslet

The much acclaimed past television series, Downton Abbey has brought more than just the English country home to our attention. It has accurately depicted an aristocratic lifestyle that was clinging for survival in the early 1900’s and sometimes found financial reprieve from wealthy Americans. The stories behind these ‘marriage mergers’ and influx of wealthy Americans and heiresses to Britain country homes were fascinating and up until now, untold. Clive Aslet, British Architectural and Lifestyle Historian, has written An Exuberant Catalogue of Dreams which features such Americans as the Astors, Vanderbilts, Carnegies, Selfridges, Hearsts and others who helped save many a English country home so that they could live to see another day.

Clive Aslet

‘Clive Aslet is an award-winning writer and journalist, acknowledged as a leading authority on Britain and its way of life. In 1977 he joined the magazine Country Life, was for 13 years its Editor and is now Editor at Large. He writes extensively for papers such as the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Spectator, and often broadcasts on television and radio.’

We are thrilled that he was able to sit down with the Artisans List for an interview to give us even further insight into this period of time and his book.

Artisans List: Mr. Aslet,what prompted you to write this book?

Clive Aslet: When my publisher at Aurum suggested that Americans who have owned, altered, restored and rescued British country houses might make a subject for a book, my first thought was that it must have been done. I then found that, to my surprise, nobody had written about it. It was calling out for treatment.

So many Americans have owned or married into country houses. There were, of course, the heiresses. Agriculture went into a long recession in the 1870s and this meant that many aristocrats, who owned landed estates, were hard up – just at the time when the rise of the plutocracy meant that fashionable life was becoming more expensive. Some of them looked across the Atlantic to the great industrial fortunes being made there and thought that they could get (in the slang of the day) ‘plenty of tin’ through marriage. One of the first to do so was Sir Thomas George Fermor-Hesketh who married Flora Sharon, daughter of an extremely rich, if notorious banker, Senator Sharon, in San Francisco. They sailed back to Easton Neston, in Northamptonshire, on his yacht, where Flora’s money was responsible for the redecoration of the family seat (or seats, because they had more than one). By the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, nearly a fifth of the peerage had American connections.

The American girl was regarded as a type – better educated and more ‘sparky’ than her British equivalent. Not all marriages between American money and British titles were happy, but the Marquess of Curzon worshiped Mary Leiter. She accompanied him to India when he was Vice-Roy and occupied the highest position that it was possible for a commoner to hold. May Goelet, who had been Consuelo Vanderbilt’s bridesmaid, had a wonderful time in the capitals of Europe, being pursued by dashing, if sometimes impecunious admirers. She surprised friends by accepting the proposal from the 8th Duke of Roxburghe, and becoming an admirable Duchess in Berwickshire.

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