BOOK: David Cannadine, "Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy"

David Cannadine: The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. (First ed.: 1990.) Papermac, 1996. 0333652185. xviii + 814 pp.

This book was first published in 1990; I bought my copy nearly twenty years ago and read most of it, but for some reason stopped before finishing, although I enjoyed the book. Titles following the “decline and fall” formula are always alluring, they remind me of good old Gibbon, and I couldn't help feeling fascinated by the topic: how a class that was formerly in an indisputably top position in society could dwindle into insignificance in little more than half a century. So now I finally got around to reading this book again; this time I finished it and can heartily recommend it to anyone interested in the subject.

Cannadine places the beginnings of the decline around 1880 or so. The segment of society he deals with — which he variously calls patricians, grandees, aristocracy, the British landed establishment, etc. — was, as of 1880, indisputably at the top of British society in various ways; they had wealth, status, and political power, and more of all of these three things than any other class:

• There had been until then a fairly widespread idea that they are the natural ruling class of the country, having the sort of temperament, experience, and leisure that is the most likely to result in good government. Most members of the parliament, cabinet ministers, military officers, etc., came from that class.

• Their wealth was largely in the form of land, and their income derived mostly from the rents paid by farmers who lived and worked on it; this was a very secure form of property and income, and they were overall still wealthier than people who got rich by industry or trade.

• Amongst this class were to be found nearly all holders of inheritable titles of nobility; and there was then no real alternative status hierarchy to the one provided by these titles.

This book is basically one long story about how all these things ceased to be true over the next fifty years or so — much of this happened already before WW1. Cannadine mentions two main causes that started this decline. One was the decline of agriculture as an important part of the British economy. The country had, some time before, basically made the decision to be an urban and industrial one, rather than a rural and agricultural one. By 1880, thanks to the progress of technology and the development of agriculture on other continents, it was possible to start importing large quantities of food into Britain, and its agriculture never quite recovered from that. The value of land and the income from rents declined, which put many patricians into increasingly straitened circumstances. Many were saddled with big debts (either from profligate ancestors or from loans taken to finance investments during previous, economically more optimistic times), so that even a small decline in the rents could lead to a dramatic decline in their actual disposable income.

The other cause for the start of the decline was the Third Reform Acts of the 1870s, which reduced the restrictions on voting and rearranged the parliamentary constituencies. After these reforms, enough people had the right to vote that politics became dominated by the middle class rather than by the aristocracy, and by the cities rather than by the countryside. In the old days a big rural landowner could be pretty sure to get into the parliament if he wanted to (or send one of his sons into parliament), but that increasingly became impossible. If they ran at all, they often failed to get enough votes; but political campaigning also got more expensive and time-consuming, which led many patricians to stop running for parliament at all. Politics increasingly became a professional activity for pushy upper-middle-class people, rather than a genteel affair that amateurish patricians could conduct on the side, as a sort of natural extension of running their own landed estates. Even the Conservative Party stopped catering to the interests of the aristocracy and became a party of big businessmen instead.

Pretty much all of the decline stems from these two causes, the rest is just details. Due to the loss of their formerly dominant political position, the patricians were unable to prevent any of the subsequent changes that weakened their position still further, such as the increase of taxes, death duties, and the like. Their political power was still further reduced in 1911, when the House of Lords lost its veto power, so the worst thing that all the hereditary peers together could do in politics thenceforth was to delay the passage of laws by a couple of years or so.

Gradually but inexorably, the traditional patrician way of life became unsustainable. An estate in the countryside was no longer a reliable source of income, but just the opposite: an endless money-sink, a liability. Traditional professions that the aristocrats used to go into if they needed to make money (e.g. younger sons who were not going to inherit their father's estate) became increasingly hard to get into: formerly one became a military officer by buying a commission; one became a parish priest by being appointed by the local landowner; one got into the diplomatic service by being appointed by the foreign secretary on the basis of a personal connection; etc. — and all these methods of entering these professions on the basis of connections used to ensure that largely only aristocrats could get in. All this was gradually replaced by more modern and professional methods, where hiring and promotion was at least theoretically on the basis of merit and performance rather than purely by connections. For example, they began holding examinations to hire civil servants. As a result, the proportion of aristocrats in these professions decreased. (Incidentally, this doesn't mean that any random old nobody could get into the top positions. It's just that the bulk of those positions was now taken by the upper-middle class rather than the aristocracy. They were still all coming from a handful of ‘public’ schools and two universities.)

In some areas, this decline took place sooner and in some later — for example, the diplomacy was still mostly aristocratic until WW1, on the argument that middle-class people would have a hard time dealing with foreign royalty and the like.

The former dominant role of the aristocrats not only became unviable economically, but also intolerable politically. The idea of a cabinet filled with mostly aristocratic ministers was increasingly regarded as anachronistic and unacceptable; gradually, insofar as there were any aristocrats in government at all, they took on less and less significant roles. The idea of a landowner living it up on the rents paid by the farmers was also increasingly objected to, and governments were increasingly OK with pressure being exerted on the landowners to sell their estates to the farmers. In parts of Ireland the English landowners found themselves the targets of political violence by Irish nationalists, and the government in London didn't try to protect them, but rather to help them get out of the business of owning land there (by setting up a compulsory buy-out scheme).

Insofar as the patricians tried to keep fighting for their interests in politics, they failed spectacularly: they couldn't prevent the House of Lords from losing its veto, (southern) Ireland from getting Home Rule, they couldn't get agricultural tariffs introduced to protect their landed estates, they couldn't prevent taxes and death duties from getting higher and higher, etc. Some went so far as to flirt with fascism, but accomplished nothing thereby either.

Their social status was also reduced by the fact that more and more titles of nobility were being granted in the late 19th and early 20th century, so they weren't as exclusive any more; and many of the new titles went to plutocrats, people who got rich in business and often had no real connection to the traditional landowning classes (and increasingly also had no interest in joining those classes; if a rich businessman bought a mansion in the countryside, it was go to there for a weekend's partying or hunting, not to live there permanently as an old-time squire). Increasingly, peerages were given to people not for any particular merit or service, but simply for donating lots of money to the prime minister's election campaign, a practice which reached its peak of notoriety under Lloyd George. From about the 1960s onwards, they stopped granting new hereditary peerages altogether (with a tiny handful of exceptions in the 1980s); and since existing peers sometimes die without an heir, Cannadine has calculated that at this rate the hereditary peerage will die out by 2175. Nowadays the status of the aristocracy is low enough that even the tabloids aren't interested in them, this role having been taken by media celebrities instead.

*

A major part of this book consists of chronicling the numerous ways in which the aristocrats tried to cope with their changing circumstances. If they knew what was good for them, they sold their land and invested the money in shares and bonds instead. Some aristocrats lost their capital in risky investments — ranching or mining in America (North or South), Australia, and the like. Some tried to go into business as company directors and the like; some of this was legitimate and occasionally even successful, but often it wasn't. Much of the public still respected aristocractic titles, and unscrupulous businessmen who wanted to promote some shady scheme would find it easier to attract investors if they had one or two lords on their board of directors.

Some managed to get jobs in the colonies, as officials or magistrates of various kinds, jobs that the aristocracy had previously left to the middle classes because the pay wasn't that good and one had to live in distant countries with an unpleasant climate much of the time. Some of the higher-ranking aristocrats could actually have a very pleasant career as colonial governors, moving from one country to another every few years and hoping to crown their career by becoming viceroys of India at some point. At a lower level, in the first half of the 20th century many aristocrats could spend a few decades in ‘ornamental’ roles as mayors, university chancellors, lord-lieutenants of counties and the like, where they were generally well-liked as long as they knew their place: an ornamental aristocrat was expected to “lend a genteel tone” to the proceedings, do as he is told, take no initiative of his own, and let the middle-class professionals and bureaucrats run the organization. The most he could hope to accomplish was to use his connections in London, if he had any, for the benefit of his city, university, or county.

Some patricians moved abroad, temporarily or permanently, where they could live more cheaply and perhaps make some money meanwhile from letting their country house in England to some rich industrialist. Sometimes the move abroad involved a desperate effort to preserve, in some colony like Kenya or Rhodesia, the sort of hierarhical social structures and way of life that was increasingly impossible in modern Britain. Some opened their mansions to tourists, either directly or by handing them over to the National Trust. Many of their stately houses were sold and demolished, or converted to hotels, schools and the like. Some tried writing books, many of them wistful memoirs of their life before the decline. Some managed to secure careers in academia (again not really a traditionally aristocratic profession). Men with a title but not much money tried to marry rich non-aristocratic heiresses, British ones at first but later increasingly Americans as well.

The two world wars exacerbated their decline still further. In WW1, they took a higher proportion of casualties, relative to their numbers, than lower classes did, so that in the post-war world, even if it had been possible for new patricians to fill the leading roles as the old ones retired, there were not enough young ones to do so. In the WW2, they were hit hard by restrictions on rents, new taxes, increasing government control of the economy, and the like. Many had their country houses requisitioned by various military or government agencies and got them back in an uninhabitable condition. Those who still had any land, old paintings and the like, found their position somewhat improved from 1970 or so, as the price of these goods began to grow.

Increasingly, the patricians' way of life began to resemble that of ordinary upper-middle-class professionals (and a few of the most unfortunate ones sank into the working class and into actual poverty). If they managed to remain reasonably wealthy, it was by having the sort of careers that upper-middle-class professionals have. Among the richest people in Britain, there were, as of the 1980s when Cannadine was writing his book, few or no landowners, and it was hard to say that the patricians still exist as a real social class at all.

*

This was a fairly long book, but an extremely interesting one. I was very impressed by the enormous amount of material that Cannadine must have studied to write this. Whenever he writes about a phenomenon or development, he never stays only at the level of generalities; he always gives you a paragraph or two of examples illustrating that phenomenon: Lord X did so and so, Sir Y did this and this, the Earl of Z did that and that. It must have taken a huge amount of work to dig up all these examples, scattered across countless official sources, memoirs and the like. Although he is clearly an academic historian, he has an engaging style of writing, I liked his fondness for alliterative phrases, and he always remembers to frequently include interesting details and anecdotes to prevent the book from getting boring.

Reading this book led me to wonder whether similar developments took place in other countries as well. Understandably, Cannadine focuses entirely on Britain and Ireland, as expanding beyond that would surely take too much work and wouldn't fit into one book; but he does have a brief section near the end of the book, comparing the decline of the aristocracy in Britain with that in other countries. The decline was a bit earlier in some countries and slower in others; e.g. in Germany and Hungary, the aristocrats remained the ruling class until WW1, and in Hungary and Poland they actually had a strong influence in the interwar period as well. But on the other hand the collapse of the old empires after WW1, the upheavals during and after the WW2, communist takeovers, land reforms and the like, tended to eradicate the aristocracy on the continent much more thoroughly than in Britain. On the whole the decline in Britain was slower and more moderate.

There are one or two questions where I wished the book had provided more explanations. For instance, being a patrician landowner somehow became unviable after 1880. But clearly the land was still being worked and farmed. If it could still support the farmer, why not the farmer plus the landowner? Obviously the farmer would get less money in this scheme, but it isn't obvious to me why it was suddenly impossible. And we know that nowadays much of the farming is actually done by corporations; so the farm supports the workers and the shareholders, who presumably get dividends from the corporation. Isn't this very similar to the old scheme of tenant farmers and the squire? If this still works for big agribusiness companies today, why not for a patrician landowner? How would it be any different from him owning 100% of the shares of such an agricultural corporation?

I can't help wondering if the real reason why the old landowning arrangements became unviable was political rather than economic; after all, whether something is viable depends a lot on how the government regulates it. An agricultural corporation doesn't die, doesn't have to be divided amongst heirs, nobody has to pay death duties for it, etc., all of which might allow it to be viable where a traditional individual landowner's position wouldn't be; but that's because the government passed laws which treat him differently than they would an agricultural corporation.

The decline of the British aristocrats as presented in this book is so relentless and inexorable that I almost felt sorry for them by the time I got to the end of the book. The world clearly wasn't going their way, and they saw it and knew it but couldn't really do anything about it. This is a position I can very much sympathize with, even though I'm neither rich nor an aristocrat. Not all of the things they stood for were bad, and not everything that replaced them was obviously better. Instead of paternalistically-minded local landowners tied closely to their land there is now a ruling class of sociopathic plutocrats tied to nothing at all, and next below it an upper-middle professonal-managerial class also increasingly bereft of any ties and obsessed with its own competitiveness and endless internal jostling for status. I can't help wishing that it had been possible to put a few of those old-time country squires into some sort of reservation somewhere :)

ToRead:

Numerous potentially interesting books are mentioned in the text, and still more in the endnotes:

• W. H. Mallock: The Old Order Changes (1886) [vol. 1, vol. 2, vol. 3]. A novel about the decline of the aristocracy, by an author who was himself “the scion of a minor squirerachical family” (p. 30).
• Anthony Trollope: The Way We Live Now (1875). Mentioned here in the context of the British aristocracy being overtaken in wealth by the plutocracy (p. 91).
• Flora Major: The Squire's Daughter (1929). A story of the “decline and fall of the De Lacey family” (p. 127). She also wrote a novel called The Rector's Daughter (1924).
• Lord Percy of Newcastle: Some Memories (1958). His “nostalgic reminiscences” (p. 141).
• Early in his career, “[b]etween 1877 and 1895”, Curzon did a good deal of travelling in Central Asia and “wrote a succession of massively erudite books which were prodigious syntheses of history, archaeology, politics, travel and adventure” (p. 378). Cannadine lists several of these books later (p. 765, n. 143): Russia in Central Asia (1889), Persia and the Persian Question (1892) [vol. 1, vol. 2], Problems of the Far East (1894). Later he also wrote Tales of Travel (1923; mentioned here on p. 765, n. 126).
• Another aristocrat, Lord Ronaldshay, also wrote several books about his travels to the Far East circa 1900 (pp. 378–9). Cannadine lists them on pp. 765–6, ns. 124, 144–5: Sport and Politics Under an Eastern Sky (1902), On the Outskirts of Empire in Asia (1904), A Wandering Student in the Far East (1908) [vol. 1, vol. 2], An Eastern Miscellany (1911).
• Evelyn Waugh: A Handful of Dust (1934). About a squire who “sets off for South America in the company of an eccentric explorer in search of a fabulous city” (p. 381). This description naturally made me wonder if the book was inspired by such things as the expeditions of Percy Fawcett, and judging by its wikipedia page there does seem to be a link: Waugh's novel was inspired by his own travels in South America, and his going there was in turn inspired by Peter Fleming's expedition in search of Fawcett a few years before. (I read Fleming's book about it, Brazilian Adventure, a long time ago. I liked Fleming's disarming honesty about the lack of any real accomplishments of his expedition; it was a bit of mildly adventurous bushwhacking that neither made any contributions to geographical science nor discovered anything definite about Fawcett's fate, and Fleming at no point tries to pretend that it was anything more than that.)
• Evelyn Waugh: Remote People (1931). Cannadine says that Waugh was sympathetic to the attempts of British aristocrats in Kenya to recreate there “the traditional life of the English squirerachy” (p. 442).
• D. Pryce Jones: Evelyn Waugh and His World (1973). Mentioned here on p. 787, n. 59.
• Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, “a Sussex squire, lecherous poet and celebrated late-Victorian misfit” (p. 382), wrote various potentially interesting works; his Poetical Works appeared in 1914 [vol. 1, vol. 2] and his Diaries in 1921 [vol. 1, vol. 2]. A biography of his is E. Longford: A Pilgrimage of Passion: The Life of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1979; mentioned here on p. 766, n. 158).
• Vita Sackville-West: The Edwardians (1930). “Her most famous novel [. . .] an evocation of the old, vanishing aristocratic society” (p. 400). Many patricians of the same period did the same thing except in memoirs rather than fiction.
• Henry Paulet, 16th Marquess of Winchester: Statesmen, Financiers and Felons (1935). The author was a downwardly mobile aristocrat who had unsuccessfully tried to mend his fortunes by agreeing to become the director of a string of enterprises that turned out to be fraudulent (pp. 415–16).
• George Moore: Hail and Farewell (1911–14); “his three volume autobiography” [Ave, Salve, Vale] was “essentially a requiem for the ascendancy” (p. 479; i.e. for the British ruling class in Ireland).
• G. G. Coulton: Friar's Lantern (1906). A novel, mentioned here in the context of patrician efforts (inevitably unsuccesful) to prevent the disestablishment of state churches (p. 491).
• Lord Willoughby de Broke: The Passing Years (1924); the “elegiac autobiography” (p. 530) of one of the “die-hard” peers, i.e. those who were the most stubbornly opposed to the loss of the House of Lords' veto power, as well as to granting Home Rule to Ireland and other similar changes.
• Amabel Williams-Ellis: The Wall of Glass (1927). A novel that includes an example of a peer joining the Labour Party, in the hope of finding “less competition” there (p. 540; in the real world, Oswald Mosley joined the Labour Party for a few years before starting his own fascist movement).
• Arthur Ponsonby: The Decline of Aristocracy (1912). He author was a landless aristocrat himself (p. 541). He later wrote another interesting and well-known book (not mentioned in the present volume), Falsehood in War-Time (1928), about propaganda in the WW1.
• Christopher Isherwood: The Memorial (1923). An “ostensibly fictitious” “picture of his family as textbook declining gentry” (p. 544).
• Nancy Mitford: Pigeon Pie (1940). Mentioned here in the context of the phenomenon where failed patricians espoused political extremism (p. 545), of which of course the Mitfords themselves provided some examples (Diana and Unity, or for that matter their father, Lord Redesdale).
• Nancy Mitford: The Pursuit of Love (1945). Mentioned here as an example of her novels being “revealing insights into her vivid sense of family and class decline” (p. 553).
• Nancy Mitford (ed.): Noblesse Oblige: An Inquiry into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy (1956). Mentioned here on p. 769, n. 87, and p. 788, n. 18, mostly in the context of the aristocracy's decline or transformation into something rather resembling the middle class.
• Nancy Mitford: The Pursuit of Love (1945); “preoccupied with the difference between the disinterested and dutiful landed gentleman and the irresponsible and unpatriotic capitalist” (p. 553).
• Nancy Mitford: Wigs on the Green (1935). A novel that pokes fun at the British fascist movement and some of her sisters' flirtations with it (Diana married Oswald Mosley, the leader of the movement); mentioned here on p. 554. Mosley and his blackshirts appear in the novel thinly disguised as ‘Captain Jack’ and his ‘Jackshirts’ :))
• Jessica Mitford: Hons and Rebels (1960). Memoirs of another Mitford sister, who became a left-wing journalist; mentioned here on p. 550.
• Jessica Mitford: A Fine Old Conflict (1978). A later memoir, mentioned on p. 623; it seems to be largely about her experiences with the U.S. Communist Party, of which she was a member for some time.
• D. Pryce Jones: Unity Mitford: A Quest (1976). Mentioned here on p. 871, n. 175. Unity was probably the craziest of the Mitford sisters; she became a fangirl of Hitler, tried to commit suicide by shooting herself when Britain and Germany declared war on each other, but survived as an invalid (or, as Cannadine puts it rather less delicately, “an incontinent vegetable”; p. 623) and died of the consequences of that injury some ten years later.
• G. M. Trevelyan: English Social History (1942); “an elegiac lament for the world of aristocratic decency and rural wholesomeness” (p. 635).
• Marghanita Laski: Love on the Supertax (1944), “a parody of Walter Greenwood's depression-ridden novel, Love on the Dole” (p. 635). The title refers to the additional tax that was added on top of the income tax for high incomes during the WW2, bringing the marginal tax rate to a delicious 98%.
• Cyril Connolly: Enemies of Promise (1938). A memoir, mentioned here on p. 666.
• H. Rider Haggard: Rural England (1902) [vol. 1, vol. 2]. This appears to be a massive work about the state of English agriculture and countryside at the beginning of the 20th century; Cannadine quotes from it on p. 95, in the context of the decline of land prices. Rider Haggard was, of course, famous as a writer of adventure novels (notably those featuring Allan Quatermain), and I had no idea that he also wrote serious works such as this one.
• Jamie Camplin: The Rise of the Rich (1979). Cited on pp. 182–3 on the eclipse of the old land-based aristocracy by the new industrial plutocracy as the richest (and soon also as the politically most influential) part of society.
• Barbara Tuchman: The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890–1914 (1967). I have long meant to read this extremely interesting-sounding book, as well as several other similar ones by Tuchman. Cannadine cites it in the context of the decline of the number of landed patricians in the House of Commons (p. 189).
• Sir Almeric Fitzroy: Memoirs (1925) [vol. 1, vol. 2]. Mentioned on p. 242 as an example of a patrician with good connections (though not much wealth), which enabled him to lead a comfortable life as a civil servant, in various positions.
• Duff Hart-Davis (ed.): End of an Era: Letters and Journals of Sir Alan Lascelles, 1887–1920 (1986). Lascelles is mentioned on p. 246–7 as an example of a courtier, one of the few careers that remained largely exclusive to aristocrats.
• Lord Ormathwaite: When I was at Court (1937). Another memoir by a courtier and a self-admitted snob (p. 249).
• Sir Charles Dundas: An Admiral's Yarns: Stray Memories of Fifty Years (1922). Mentioned on p. 273 as an example of how many high-ranking officers were of a patrician background.
• George Young: Diplomacy Old and New (1921). Quoted on p. 280 in the context of diplomacy staying the preserve of aristocrats for longer than other civil-service careers.
• Lord Vansittart: The Mist Procession (1958). Memoirs of a prominent diplomat, cited on p. 280 in the same context as the previous entry.
• Lord Hardinge of Penhurst: Old Diplomacy (1947). Cited on pp. 282–3 as an example of a diplomat whose early career was helped by his aristocratic connections. Later he was also the Viceroy of India for a few years (1910–16).
• Sir Arthur Hardinge: A Diplomatist in Europe (1927). Cited on p. 284 in the context of how the high-ranking diplomatic posts were also attractive to the patricians due to providing them with a lavish lifestyle that few could otherwise have afforded. Next year he published a second volume of memoirs, A Diplomatist in the East (1928).
• Sir Victor Wellesley: Diplomacy in Fetters (1944). Cited on p. 290 in the context of how patrician diplomats tended to be distrustful of democratic politics once it was out of the hands of the aristocratic class. Earlier Cannadine also mentions the memoir of Victor's father: Frederick Wellesley, Recollections of a Soldier Diplomat (1941).
• Sir John Tilley: London to Tokyo (1942). Cited on p. 292 in the context of how the old pre-WW1 courtly and aristocratic society, of which diplomacy used to be an important part, largely disappeared or became disconnected from politics after the war.
• Violet Bonham Carter: Winston Churchill As I Knew Him (1967). Cited here on p. 349 in the context of how Society was changing as the result of declining patrician influence. She was the daughter of the former Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, and incidentally the grandmother of the actress Helena Bonham Carter. Nowadays you hear about the ‘six degrees of separation’, but in early-20th-century British high society it seems it was more like two degrees as most :)
• Louis Turner and John Ash: The Golden Hordes: International Tourism and the Pleasure Periphery (1975). (Cited on p. 371 in relation to the fact that the patricians used to travel more and more, to increasingly distant lands, as travel became easier and faster; and this tended to weaken their traditional ties to the land at home.) The title is priceless, but the subtitle makes me suspect that the rest of the book is a dry-as-heck academic monograph. One review says it is a “highly polemical view” of international tourism, so I guess I would find a fair few things to agree with in that book.
• Lord Cranworth: A Colony in the Making, or Sport and Profit in British East Africa (1912) and Kenya Chronicles (1939). Cited here on pp. 376, 436, 439. We have encountered the first of these books in the pages of this blog before. Cranworth was a big-game hunter and later a promoter of Kenya as a place for upper-class Britons to settle in and take up farming; but he disapproved greatly of the louche and frivolous type of settlers that one now usually hears about, the Happy Valley set and the like.
• Errol Trzebinski: Silence Will Speak: A Study of the Life of Denys Finch Hatton and His Relation With Karen Blixen (1977) and The Kenya Pioneers (1985). Cited here on p. 440 in the context of British patricians migrating to Kenya in the early 20th century. Trzebinski also wrote a book about the life and murder of Lord Erroll some time ago; see my post about it.
• Dane Kennedy: Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1939 (1987). Cited here on p. 436 in the context of how the early British colonization of Rhodesia was “almost exclusively in the interests of aristocratic adventurers”.
• Isabel Colgate: The Shooting Party (1982). In this novel, a British aristocrat moves to Kenya to avoid getting in trouble for shooting an employee in dubious circumstances — a fictional example of the sort of things that also happened in reality, especially in the early post-WW1 period (Cannadine, p. 440 and n. 157 on p. 772).
• Hon. George Lambton: Men and Horses I Have Known (1924). The title sounds like the author embraced the stereotype of the British country squire and I can only hope that he looked like a real-life copy of John Bull :) Cannadine mentions him on p. 394 as an example of an impecunious patrician who, finding himself obliged to get a job, picked up something related to the traditional pursuits of his class and became “an outstandingly successful racehorse trainer”.
• Victoria de Bunsen: Charles Roden Buxton: A Memoir (1948). Cited here on p. 542, Buxton being an example of a patrician who joined the Labour Party, mostly it seems out of quite high-minded motives. I heard of Buxton before, because Sven Hedin quoted him in his propaganda book, America in the Struggle of the Continents; Buxton, it seems, was such a committed pacifist that as late as May 1939 he still argued that Germany was being treated unfairly, and recommended more appeasement.
• John Pearson: Facades: Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell (1978). An interesting passage is quoted on p. 545 here, discussing Osbert Sitwell as an example of a patrician who felt lost and alienated in the interwar period, when both his own class and he individually no longer had the sort of prominence that he perhaps expected they should. I should like to read more about the Sitwells and their attempt to establish an ersatz Bloomsbury group some time, and Pearson's book sounds like just the thing.
• Richard Griffiths: Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany, 1933–9 (1983). Cited here on p. 546; many of these fellow travellers were disaffected patricians whose opinions were “a bitter amalgam of paranoia and disenchantment”. I'm not sure why, but I find fellow travellers of the nazis much more interesting than the actual nazis themselves :)
• Lord Raglan: If I Were Dictator (1934). Mentioned on p. 546: “When Methuen published an ostensibly light-hearted series entitled If I Were Dictator, the jokes turned out to be very serious indeed.” Raglan thought that “politicians were too busy talking to govern”, and similarly Churchill suggested in 1930 that “an alternative structure of executive government was needed”. It seems that there was a widespread sense of disappointment with democratic politics in the interwar period, and the allure of fascism went far beyond just those countries that ended up on the Axis side of the WW2; it would be interesting to read more about this, and one can't help feeling that we have more than a little of that sort of disappointment nowadays as well. — On an unrelated subject, I find in the wikipedia that Raglan also published several interesting-sounding anthropological works, notably Jocasta's Crime (1933), “a study of incest and incest taboos”.
• Philip Woodruff (pseud. of Philip Mason): The Men Who Ruled India (1954). 2 vols.: The Founders and The Guardians. Cited here on p. 601, about the patricians as “great ornamentals” in their positions as Viceroys of India and the like.
• The Duke of Bedford: A Silver-Plated Spoon (1959). As the title of this memoir suggests, he was one of those many patricians whose finances weren't all that great; he resorted to opening his estate to visitors to bring in some money (p. 646). In this he was “brash, undignified, and pushy [. . .] likened to a circus impressario”, and as a result he made a lot of money. He even set up a safari park there.
• Nicholas Monson and Debra Scott: The Nouveaux Pauvres: A Guide to Downward Nobility (1984). Cited on p. 659, about various patricians who now make their living in fairly conventional middle-class jobs. Monson himself was the grandson of a baron (says the wikipedia), so presumably he wrote from personal observation :)
• Arno J. Mayer: The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (1981). Cited on p. 698 with regard to the observation that “the old regime persisted on the Continent for a longer time, and to a greater extent, than it was once fashionable to suppose”.
• Lord Montagu of Beaulieu: More Equal Than Others: The Changing Fortunes of the British and European Aristocracies (1970). Cited on p. 700, with regard to the observation that the French aristocracy declined much more in influence (after the introduction of the Third Republic in 1870) than the British.

In the process of compiling the above list, I found several misprints, especially when it comes to names; “Isobel” Colgate (p. 772; should be “Isabel”), “Ormanthwaite” (pp. 249, 750; the correct spelling, “Ormathwaite”, appears on p. 248); “The Walls of Glass” (p. 540; should be “Wall”); “Sachaverell” (p. 781; should be “Sacheverell”). Now I can't help wondering how many other little errors there are in the book that I haven't noticed.