BIG ESTATES OF ENGLAND DWINDLING

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 82, Issue 288, 6 December 1938, Page 6

BIG ESTATES OF ENGLAND DWINDLING

CRUSHING BURDEN OF TAXATION BEING FELT

What is it like to be master of a large English country place? Put yourself in the position of any one of a hundred lords of mansions and see for yourself. On your 20,000-acre property you will have 100 farms, each rented to a tenant farmer. Some of them will be the tenth of the familyin succession to occupy their farm—an unbroken succession dating back 300 years or more. They pay 30/- a year for each acre they till. That means a yearly income of £15,000 in farm rent alone—in good years. But if the farmers cannot make ends meet, the lord of the manor will be expected to cut their rent to a figure they can pay. But no matter how large your income from farm rent, sale of wood, rent of the cottages in the four or five villages on the estate, you cannot make ends meet. Not a single big estate in England, it is calculated, pays for itself. Owners wh o have other sources of wealth keep them up for tradition’s sake. Others have been financially unable to do it, and their acres have been cut up into separate farms, or simply abandoned, with one watchman the sole inhabitant of the great halls, the lawns, the terraces scenes of a glory long departed. Clumber, magnificent 18th. century home of the Duke of Newcastle and one of England’s show places is being torn down—latest of the great English country places to go out of existence. Many big landed estates have been broken up since the war and it is inevitable, other owners maintain, that many more will be sold within a fewyears. Although being head of an old noble family is supposed to mean wealth and responsibility, in recent years the dukes and earls have been finding the wealth getting less and the responsibility greater. England’s landed nobility is making a “last-ditch” stand against crushing death duties and taxes, but the big estates—the little kingdoms over which a duke or an earl ruled, with often as many as 1000 persons dependent on his land or his employment—are breaking up. But even yet, half the land in this country of 40,000,000 inhabitants is owned by some 400 persons. Historic places are coming under under the hammer because the British Government, which adds a penny tax to the poor man’s pound of tea, takes a sizeable chunk out of a rich man’s estate when he dies. And the Government wants its share in cash — so the old family place has to be sold.

The Butes owned land which gradually became Cardiff—farm land and •waste land which through the years was absorbed by the fast-growing city. But Cardiff grew because the Butes made it grow.

The present marquess’s grandfather stinted himself of all luxury and mortgaged everything he owned to convert a small fishing village into one of the great ports of the world. The biggest stimulus to Cardiffs growth was the construction of the Bute docks. They cost £350,000. But they made Cardiff so great a port that in 1922 the Great Western Railway paid £5,000,000 for them.

Even when the Butes gave away land to the city they profited by th? gifts. A large tract of marshy waste was presented to the city and con-

verted into a park. It was surrounded by land owned by the Bute family. The park became the city’s most popular suburb and ground rents went up sharply in value. Seven years ago the city received free a muddy pool formed in a quarry. The water seeped away, and the neighbourhood was built up—bringing thousands of pounds in ground rent to the Butes. The Butes were among the early Scots who discovered how easy it was to descend into England and make money. The first Bute came down from his rugged crags in 1766. He was seeking a bride, and found one in the daughter of a Welsh nobleman. Her dowry of land became one of the richest coal fields in all Wales, and has yielded the Butes as much as 1250,000 a year in royalties. They own 117,000 acres of land altogether. The Biggest Estates. Even in so vast a country as Canada a man who owns a full section, a square mile containing 640 acres, is looked upon as a big land owner. But in tiny England there are scores of men who own ten times as much, dozens who call 100 square miles—--64,000 acres—their own. To name only a few who can drive 10 miles, north, south, east or west without leaving their property, there are Lord Derby, the Earl of Zetland, the Duke of Bedford, Lord Leconfield, Lord Fitzwilliam, the Duke of Westminster, Sir Watkin Williams-Eynn. The Duke of Westminster owns a big slice of the west end of London, comprising some of the most valuable property in the world. His 480 acres in London he values at 130,000,000. Not long ago he sold eight acres for 11,000,000. Lord Londonderry keeps up 90,000 acres and a glamorous castle, Mountstewart. He is well known as a politician, but is one of the biggest land owners. Lord Derby, the genial racehorse man who has the world’s greatest turf classic named after his family, does not own his home county of Derbyshire, but he does call just about onethird of the industrial county of Lancashire his own. It was a present to the family, then known as the Stanleys. •Then" refers to the days when Richard 111 and Henry VII were fighting each other in the Wars of the Roses. Lord Stanley, from whom descended a long line of Earls of Derby, shrewdly decided that Henry would be the winner. So he moved over, bag, baggage and followers, into Henry's camp. He guessed right, too, so Henry gave Stanley all the lands of Lancatrians who had founght against him, and that amounted to a nice slice of Lancashire. I But the dukes and earls and lords and marquises are not all prospering. There is Hugh Hamon Charles George, eighth Baron Massey, for example. Leitrim County Council, near Dublin, would like to talk to him about some back taxes he owes on his ancestral 1000 acres. Baron Massey moved out of the big stone mansion that goes with the I estate and is living in a tumble-down , lodge at the gates of the castle. He I brews tea for sale to sight-seers and i makes ends meet that way.—By Barton HalL