The Real Life Downton Abbey Read Online Free PDF Page B

amount of spending.
    It’s difficult to be a freeloader. Any player in this exclusive world is required to spend just as freely as the next person in their group when it’s their turn – and the extravagances are huge. As King, Edward prefers the self-made entrepreneurs to the old-fashioned aristocrats, for the self-made ‘showing off’ – essentially for its own sake – is part and parcel of the super-toffs ’ way of life. Appearances count for everything.
    Yet in some grand aristocratic houses, an announcement that the King plans a visit can sometimes be greeted with consternation: so enormous is the cost of entertaining him and his cronies for just a few days it might involve a year’s worth of economising for the host family – or even tip them into debt.
    It isn’t just the food and booze, the extravagantly displayed eight-course dinners of the finest French cuisine, the crates of the King’s favourite French champagne, it’s the little extras that pad out the bill: the finest cigars he loves to smoke, the heavy gambling sessions into the small hours, the lengthy shooting sessions of game. And, of course, there are the human ‘extras’ required for putting up the royal mistress of the time, in the regal style to which she is accustomed, naturally.
    No detail is overlooked: this is a time when the status-conscious rich will go as far as to measure the height of their footmen – to make sure they’re all the same height. After all, it won’t look good to have two liveried footmen of different heights on either side of a door. Your friends might notice. And comment.
    The King leads the way in this obsession with detail; at one point, he ticks off Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough for having a semi-crescent of diamonds in her hair at dinner instead of a proper tiara. Shameful, eh?
    At the other end of the scale, the working classes of the era frequently struggle to survive and feed large families on a standard wage of £1 a week or less. For the lower live-in servants, pay is sometimes much less than this. Yet the wealthy and slavish followers of the very latest fashion or trend don’t blink an eyelid at forking out today’s equivalent of £20–30,000 for a first-class return ticket, Southampton to New York, on one of the new transatlantic ocean liners going across the Atlantic to the New World.
    At the brand new Ritz hotel in London, opening in 1906 to cater exclusively to the super-rich and their friends, fountains are created which spout only the finest champagne. Ultra-fashionable women think nothing of spending the equivalent of £3,000 on just one hat. It is standard practice to use their husbands’ millions to visit Paris high fashion salons twice a year, ordering dozens of the most exquisite creations of the time from French designer houses like Worth or Doucet and having each dress shipped home, beautifully wrapped, in its own individual trunk (beats a cardboard Tiffany or Gucci box any day, doesn’t it?).
    Make no mistake, following on from the sober restraint of the Victorian years, this is a period of completely over-the-top conspicuous consumption for the wealthy. And the only ordinary people who really have a permanent close-up view of all this sumptuous extravagance are, of course, the servants – without TV and radio, many don’t know much about the indulgences and excesses of the rich – though the newspapers of the time chronicle their travels – and their scandals, should they come to light.
    Yet in some cases, things have been getting a bit tight financially for the aristocrats with the ‘old’ money. Not all estates are managed or run as well as they should be. Once they could do very nicely thank you by living off the agricultural proceeds of the estate. But not any more: many English aristocrats now find themselves in a situation where they might still be asset-rich in terms of jewels, shares and land, yet there’s very little cash. So how do you find large sums of cash fast