Henry Astor on his farm in Milton-under-Wychwood
In medieval times Wychwood Forest was West Oxfordshire. The three villages of Shipton, Ascott and Milton –under-Wychwood were under the jurisdiction of separate forest law. Wychwood was a Royal Hunting Forest – the deer and other animals therein belonged absolutely to the King. Poaching game risked a diverse and creative range of punishments from hanging, castration, and blinding, to being sewn into a deerskin and then hunted down by ferocious dogs. Being sent to Australia wasn’t in the judge’s sentencing repertoire back then.
The pressure for more farmland and huge demands for wood to build ships in wartime, which was just about all the time, meant the forests of Britain were soon whittled away to island copses. Hundreds of masts hewn from whole timbers now lie on the sea floor with the detritus of all human ambition, not to mention fast food packaging.
In the nineteenth century, agriculture efficiency driver, Arthur Young, reported that Wychwood Forest was badly managed, commercially unproductive, and harbouring immoral and criminal activities. Without further ado, almost all the remainder of it was clear felled and enclosed (made into private landholdings) in the mid 1800s. Nigel and Jane Adams, the hardworking couple we met in a previous blogpost (They’re a lot like us), work part of the farmland thus created.
To my eyes, accustomed to the bare hills of eastern New Zealand, the Wychwood area is lavishly wooded. The estates of Bruern, Cornbury, Barrington and Blenheim add up to thousands of acres in well-managed woodland. The exquisite columns of trees draped over the road to Upper Milton bring me to a standstill. My nephew falls in love with a lone beauty in a field of yellow rape flower.
The Wychwood (ecological restoration) Project is trying to expand and connect the tracts of forest – home for owls and butterflies and a hundred other species of plants and animals that have been forced into the open, their habitats isolated by industrial-size fields. The massive combine harvesters need room to manoeuvre. Henry Astor is a Project Trustee, listed on their website as a farmer, Milton-under-Wychwood – just the endangered species I’m looking for. We arrange to meet in the Lamb Inn. A quick internet search the night before reveals that he is great grandson of Nancy Astor, Britain’s first female MP. I see.
Nancy was born in Virginia, to a family struggling to make a living in the ground zero aftermath of the American Civil War. The family fortunes changed dramatically, but the first imprint of financial insecurity was no doubt hardwired. Nancy observed her mother’s quiet strength and self-sacrifice in managing the situation against her father’s volatile temperament. Nancy came to Britain to recover from a disastrous first marriage.
I think of her when I tour Blenheim Palace to find out more about Winston Churchill, my indirect benefactor. The fabulous tour guide, in real danger of being choked by his silken neck scarf, stops by the portrait of Consuelo Vanderbilt to tell us the potted history of this unhappy wife of the 9th Duke of Marlborough. It was common in those days for aristocrats to marry new American money to rescue their moribund estates. The Americans got a good return in titles and the society entrees they still craved. Consuelo was one such sacrifice; she wept under cover of her bridal veil. It didn’t help that she was considerably taller than the Duke. She wasn’t his first choice either. They eventually divorced, and she got to marry the Frenchman she loved. Consuelo died a year before Churchill and is buried in the same cemetery at Bladon.
I’ll let you read the Wikipedia entry about Nancy Astor yourselves, including her many witty remarks. My favourite is her reply to an Englishwoman, who rather rudely asked her, “Have you come to get our husbands?” “If you knew the trouble I had getting rid of mine…” she retorted. In fact her second marriage to Waldorf Astor was not a financial transaction. It was a love match of equals and continued to be so. She took British high society and Parliament by force of wit and a strong belief in the abilities of women, including her own. Nancy withdrew from politics at the end of WWII, which transformed the political and social space.
Just after the war, her son Michael bought Bruern Estate – a mere bungalow on the scale of his childhood home, Cliveden. Henry Astor is the son of Michael’s son David, all inheritors of the Astor Y-chromosome. He looks more than a bit like the photo of Nancy on the front of the biography I’m reading.
Henry’s father and mother have retired, but still live on the Estate, which straddles the two villages my great grandparents came from – Lyneham and Milton-under-Wychwood. Like the Hartley family, they have played a big role in village affairs.
Henry is matter of fact about his remarkable ancestry, and has obviously been determined to make his own fortune, without use of the Waldorf Astor name as an accelerant. He was quite the rebel in his youth (expelled from school twice – I didn’t ask for what), and seems very aware of the pathology of aristocratic heritage and its unnatural system of child rearing. You’d think they’d have learnt more about parent-child bonding after hundreds and thousands of years of animal breeding. It seems we have suppressed and perverted our natural instincts while writing 1000 page papers on the habits of barnacles – no offence intended to the author, Charles Darwin, to whom biology owes everything.
So much of 19th and 20th century “life” science has been dead birds in drawers. But now, with genetic studies like the 43-year-old Dunedin Longitudinal Study, we are learning so much more about what is in us and what makes us. A single change in your DNA, a father’s warm hand on your shoulder, or simply a father who is there, can make a huge difference.
Winston Churchill was an emotionally starved child, wanting far more of his mother than he received. (This could account for him wearing velvet ‘onesies’ around the house.) Winston was an affectionate husband and father himself. It was widely believed that his beloved wife Clementine was related to the Mitford sisters, that her real father was their grandfather.
I wonder at a regime dominated (back in June) by two Etonian classmates – albeit top of their class. No-one alive today will ever see two lads from 1B3, Basingstoke Comprehensive, in charge of Westminster, I’ll wager. But since leaving the UK and writing this, the political wheel post-Brexit has turned, though not necessarily in favour of the Basingstoke lads. I wonder what Nancy would make of it. She might have sympathised with Boris’s tendency to blurt things out – the downside of a quick wit. The brain has a mind of its own, and some people have no editing function.
Henry’s self and social awareness were further developed by a Masters in Visual Anthropology from Manchester University. This qualification gave him a way into marketing and documentary making. 17 years in New York have neutralised any public school vowels he may have left with. I think it’s fashionable to have no accent, if that is indeed possible. I am trying, unsuccessfully, to lose my own as a matter of practical survival. No-one seems to have heard of Nyu Zillund, even though the Queen is still nominally in charge of us. How on Earth does Prime Minister John Key manage at European forums. I suppose he wears a name tag.
Like forests, budgets for documentaries have shrunk over time, and ad men burn out of that game by their forties. Henry is back home, and full of ideas for diversifying the family business, which is suffering no less than other farms from the downturn in commodity prices. I don’t think I can divulge what those ideas are … a horse wanders over to listen in to Henry’s plans (we’re on the farm now, not in the pub!) and his laments about the dearth of biodiversity in the deceptively beautiful countryside around us.
What a coincidence! The next day I have lunch with Joy and Paul Fischer, who has been making fine musical instruments, including harpsichords, lutes, and the modern classical guitar, for 60 years. He, himself, is a Chipping Norton treasure. Paul was a UK Churchill Fellow in 1983 and has responded to my call for help, published in the Chipping Norton newspaper. He used his grant to go to Brazil to investigate tropical hardwood varieties that could be used for his guitar bodies.
It turns out that Henry made a documentary about Paul two or three years ago. The guitar we watch Paul make is played by virtuoso Xuefei Yang, and produces a transcendental sound. Outside Paul’s quiet workshop in Chipping Norton, the snow falls – in the documentary that is, though snow seemed all too possible in May. Just after Henry left on the last day of filming, Paul had a major stroke, and lay alone and helpless in the house. It was a serious one, but here he is now – fit, animated, charming, and guiding the construction of a very special guitar that was to debut on 2 July. It is replica of Percy Shelley’s – the original is in the Bodleian Library. The programme also featured other Paul Fischer guitars, including his last, number 1200.
Two art treasures of Chipping Norton
Paul puts me on to a retired forester, who lives right opposite him. Martin Jarratt was employed by Henry’s father, David, to manage the 350-acre forest at Bruern Estate, which he did for 26 years. I read Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders before I left Nyu Zillund, to get some idea of what it was like to make your living from the forest in the 19th century. It tells me much more about the slippery social slopes. The educated-above-her-station Grace comes back from school and is encouraged to set her sights higher than childhood sweetheart, Giles, the patient and enduring woodsman. She is thrown at the GP up the hill who, while taking his pleasure with a less complicated village girl, aspires to the attractive wealthy widow who owns the forest and holds Giles’ future in her hands. Hardy makes haunting lovers and heroes of men of the land. My favourite: Gabriel Oak(!) the always-there-when-you-need-him sheep farmer in Far from the Madding Crowd.
As you might expect, Martin is as quiet and understated as a Hardy hero. He reveals his knowledge of trees and weeds and pests to a very appreciative listener. Speaking of pests, I took the wrong road (again) out of Chipping Norton and ended up returning to Shipton-under-Wychwood on a far orbit past Jupiter and Witney. I saw a badger waiting patiently to cross the A44, which almost made it worth the extra hour’s drive. It was as surprising as seeing a possum in Lambton Quay at lunchtime. Badgers, like possums, are infected with TB, Martin tells me, and need to be controlled. This is difficult for many animal-loving Britons to accept. Beatrix Potter has a lot to answer for. We only ever see dead possums, so the concept of eradicating them is not quite as difficult. Other significant pests in the UK are two escapees from captivity – mink and Muntjac deer.
Martin was born in Thames Ditton, Surrey, but turned his back on the predatory metropolis about to devour it. He studied agriculture at Harper Adams University in Shropshire. He recounts the history of the Abbey on Bruern Estate – once a Cistercian establishment, founded in 1147. Henry VIII put an end to that. Martin found remnants of the old building in the grounds and shows me a couple of fragments he kept as mementoes and to rest his pot plants on. The “new” Abbey building has had various histories – it accommodated Americans in WWII, prior to Michael Astor’s advent, and until recently was a prep school for boys with learning difficulties but wealthy parents … the lawns and avenues of trees we can see through the wrought iron gates are works of geometric art.
Martin tells me that the word ‘lawn’ originally referred to a clearing in the forest. We have about 10 million hectares in lawn in New Zealand. Grass is our specialty. Unfortunately, it’s becoming quite expensive to keep. I knew we’d find our way back to the price of milk.
Martin Jarratt, with a bit of the old Bruern Abbey under his pot plant
