GREAT FAMILIES

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLV, Issue 21186, 5 November 1938, Page 6

GREAT FAMILIES

Rooted in the Soil The Record in England Lord Rothschild has decided to move himself, his family, and his family treasures from the somewhat suburban beauty of Tring Park to the unspoilt England of West Suffolk, writes J. Wentworth Day in the “Daily Mail.” And he has sold his great mansion in Piccadilly. Lord Cadman has turned his Shenley Park estate in Buckinghamshire into a limited company so that taxation cannot break it, and his children may dwell there for generations. Mr J. V. Rank, the miller, has bought thousands of acres in Hampshire; set himself up as a country squire. Now these three men are millionaires. They have pride of family and pride of possession. They wish to perpetuate both. So they have gone back to the land. The land is the nursery of genius, the backbone of nationhood, and humanity’s insurance policy against racial decay. It is an odd fact that practically no great family in history has ever survived three generations of life in the city. The city kills them. It saps their vitality, growth dies. A Fatal Mistake Time and again you will find records of men of undoubted ability, sometimes of actual genius, who have founded great families, built great fortunes, desired to perpetuate dynasties of achievement and leadership. But they have made the fatal mistake of rooting themselves in towns. Where are they to-day? Where are the Greshams, once the banking princes of Tudor London, men so rich that they could afford to flaunt the King? Where are the Whittingtons? Where are the Rokesleys, goldsmiths whose wealth was fabulous —and where is the blood of Simon Francis, twice Lord Mayor of London, owner of six of tile richest manors in Middlesex? And where, if you want two stout knights who meant all the fighting spirit of London trade, where are the descendants 'Of Sir William Philpot and Sir William Walworth? Their names live in Philpot Lane, in Walworth itself—but who remembers these two, so rich and powerful in their day that they were trustees for the State money of Richard ll—the first forerunners of the present Chancellor of the Exchequer? Philpot, the fighting merchant, took his own fleet to sea, routed the Scots pirates, seized a convoy of Spanish ships, defied the King’s Council. Walworth is the man who struck down Wat Tyler with his own dagger at the head of his rebel army. I dare say they all have their descendants to-day. But I find none who have perpetuated their ancestors’ records of great service. The Great Families But look on the other side of this picture. The Russells, who came over with William the Conqueror from Cap Rozelle in Normandy, have given us not only successive Dukes of Bedford, one of whom reclaimed half a million acres of the Fens and town planned half London, but they have given us also a Prime Minister, several ambassadors, innumerable diplomats, statesmen, soldiers, and Empire administrators—all men of outstanding ability. They even produced a parson who Immortalised the name by breeding the Jack Russell terrier. To-day there are Russells on the Bench, at the Bar, in the city, on the Stock Exchange—even in Fleet Street—all branches of the same root, all leaders in their spheres. That is because the Russells are of the land, bom on the land, and return to the land before they die. It is the same with the Cecils. Their name stands out in Parliamentary history. You can be sure to find it somewhere near the front in whatever age they lived. What of the men of to-day, the selfmade aristocrats, the founders of new dynasties? Mr C. R. Fairey, the aircraft millionaire, one of the most brilliant brains in the industry, with a sixfigure income, told me that his proudest boast is that his family have been farmers, millers, and com dealers in Huntingdonshire for a thousand years. That means more to him than his fleet of aeroplanes, his magnificent steam yacht, his J class cutters. And Mr Fairey has gone back to the land, bought two estates within the past year or two. From the Country Lord Perry, the English head of Ford Motors, told me he came to London from the country as a youth, proud of his yeoman stock, determined to conquer the city that was paved wtih gold. In those days he lived in a back room in Stamford Street, “full of murderers, sneakthieves, and low women," he says. “It was scarcely safe to walk home at night, but it was the best I could afford.”

To-day Lord Perry’s path is paved with gold. And Lord Perry lives on an island, secretly, far from London. I have been there. Lord Nuffield has hired heraldic experts to trace out a pedigree which, for hundreds of years, ticks off, like the beat of a clock, farmer after farmer, yeoman after yeoman. And you do not find Lord Nuffield setting himself up in a mansion in London. He stays in Oxfordshire, in a house built in Tudor days.