The second of Catherine Bailey's histories of upper-class English families written from archives and contemporary diaries and correspondence that I've read, this book reveals the lengths that a ducal family would stoop to to keep their son-and-heir out of the trenches in WW1 - despite heartily disliking him as a person and blaming him for the loss of their elder son some years before! A myth has long been perpetrated in England that a lost generation perished in the carnage of 1914-18 and that they were the best of the rising generation that would have assumed leadership of this country had they lived. This book to a considerable extent demolishes that myth, and makes our then so-called upper classes appear as no more than a set of double-dealing hypocrites! Forget "Downton Abbey", "Upstairs, Downstairs" and stuff of that ilk; for a man to be awarded a KG for services to army-recruitment whilst at the same time making sure his son is kept away from the fighting just about reaches the depths! One can only assume that - as his contemporaries noted - as he was a bit dim he saw no incompatibility in his actions.
This is a carefully researched and well-written book; no conclusions are reached without the evidence being cited , and where there is room for doubt or conjecture this is stated. But the story is quite compelling, more so if one realises that these people were at one time regarded as next to royalty. My own father was a butler before serving in the army from 1939 to 1946, and he was born when deference was a matter of course. It seems to me that the aristocracy betrayed the class of people dependent on them and treated them with contempt. Before anyone thinks about watching "Downton Abbey" I suggest they read this book first. "Gosford Park", being more of a pastiche, is a better bet, as it brought out for me the essential loneliness of life "in service", rather than trying to play up a golden age that - for the servants, at any rate - never, ever existed.