Wildlife in depression, C.1870–1940^147great estates: game preservation
and exotic fauna
The demise of the landed estate, such an important influence on England’s
ecology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is often hastened in
popular accounts. It is true that many landed families fell into financial
difficulties from the 1880s. Janice de Saumarez described in 1895 how
the income from the family’s Suffolk estates (Shrubland, Livermere and
Broke Hall) had fallen from between £10,000 and £12,000 per annum to
virtually nothing. Tenants had been giving in their notice, and ‘although
we have arrived at the point of having no income, everything indicates a
further fall of an indefinite and incalculable amount’.^48 But few estates were
actually broken up in the period before the Great War, in part because most
landed families had investments outside the agricultural sector, and were
not entirely dependent on the fortunes of farming. Following the war there
were more sales: the Times famously commented in 1922 that a quarter
of England had changed hands during the previous 4 years. Yet in many
cases, hard-pressed families sold off outlying farms but retained, at least
for a while, the core of their properties.^49 Alternatively, estates passed intact
to new owners, who had made their fortunes in industry or commerce –
for well into the twentieth century the kudos attached to the ownership of
landed property remained strong. Indeed, a number of entirely new country
houses were actually erected in the first quarter of the twentieth century, and
gardens and parks were frequently revamped and replanted.^50 It was only
with the arrival of a more general economic depression in the 1930s that the
supply of potential purchasers dried up, and estates began to fragment on
some scale, although it was not until after World War II (during which many
country houses had been occupied, and badly damaged, by the military) that
sales and demolitions came thick and vast. Grandiose statements of wealth
seemed increasingly anachronistic and pointless in the new, post-War world.
Yet even then substantial numbers of large estates survived, and in many
districts they remain an active force in the countryside to this day.
In some ways, the influence of landed estates on the environment reached
a peak around 1900. The fashionable example set by the Prince of Wales
at Sandringham in Norfolk, coupled with a more general enthusiasm for
healthy outdoor activities and the need for landed estates to diversify their
incomes, led to a further expansion in organized game shooting. Wealthy
businessmen were now increasingly involved, paying for the privilege of
joining a shoot, or even renting farms or entire estates during the shooting
season. The numbers of game shot continued to rise (Figure 27). At Holkham
in Norfolk the annual ‘bag’ increased from 3,252 partridges and 1,443
pheasants in 1853–4 to 4,599 partridges and 4,149 pheasants in 1900–01;
at Stowlangtoft in Suffolk average bags of around 2,700 in the 1850s rose
to an astonishing 13,296 in 1897–8.^51 The greatest expansion in shooting