The Dukes (29 page)
"Freddie March" was famous in the early thirties as a racing-car driver. Probably no one person did more to foster British amateur car-racing than he, who converted a wartime airfield at Goodwood into the only permanent racing-track in England. It was "permanent" until 1966, when the risks to spectators as speeds became greater forced him to abandon it.
The Duke was one of the first landed aristocrats to foresee the necessity of adapting to a more restricted life-style. The familiar story of successive death duties changed the prospects of Goodwood over a few years, with the 7th Duke dying in 1928, and the 8th Duke soon after in 1935. Gordon Castle in Scotland was sold, with thousands of acres, another Scottish estate of 45,000 acres in Banffshire was sold to the Crown in 1937; pictures, rare books, went under the hammer. All that was left was the estate at Goodwood, and even that had to be compressed after the war, when the Duke had to face the ultimate decision how to carry on living at Goodwood in changed circumstances. In common with his reforming ancestors, he solved the problem in a characteristically social-minded way. (He says, incidentally, that the social conscience of the Richmonds lay in abeyance for 100 years, and that he was brought up strictly to think of "us and them".)
The Duke established various industries at Goodwood, to bring income to the estate and employment to tenants. A thriving wood turnery, making anything from chair legs upwards, was started with one circular saw. Private companies were formed, of which Goodwood Estates Ltd is the chief, to run the industries, the racecourse, and the house. The Duke and his son, Lord March, are now both tenants of this company, in which neither has a major shareholding. One whole wing of Goodwood, containing thirty bedrooms, was converted into five well-appointed flats, and let to workers and staff at peppercorn rents; some other rooms were made into a working-man's club. The Duke established a private pension scheme for all tenants at his own expense.
In 1950 "Glorious Goodwood", which Greville thought combined everything that was enjoyable in life, was opened to the public (it had been open once a week since 1912). In 1958 the Duke moved out of Goodwood House to a small cottage on the estate, with six rooms, where he now lives with his wife and a staff of two old-age pensioners. His son, Lord March, lives in one wing of Goodwood House, and runs the family businesses, which continue to grow and diversify. It is a long journey from the coal tax, which gave the first Duke and his descendants an income from every ton of coal exported from the Tyne. This was sold to the government in 1800 for £728,333, and was finally abolished in 1831. There are, however, the Goodwood races (horses, not cars) which have been among the most celebrated since 1802. Goodwood has one of the only two privately owned racecourses in the country, the other being Ascot, which belongs to the Queen.
The Duke of Richmond has managed, in a quiet and unheralded way, to straddle the chasm between the aristocratic life to which he was born and the society of middle-class and working-class people with whom he has spent much of his life. He has worked in a factory, and has run a car business in London. In this he is not alone in the twentieth century, but he has been more successful, because it is in his blood. He does not see the difficulty, nor the incongruity, of entertaining the Queen and Prince Philip at Goodwood, and personally waiting upon one's charwoman when she is ill. His grandfather would have shuddered, and there are other ducal incumbents now who would shudder still. Richmond is an unpretentious man, of easy manners, amiable, charming, good company, with a sense of humour sometimes at his own expense, and helpful. Hervey's remark on the 2nd Duke, his ancestor, could be applied with equal felicity to him. He has inherited not only four dukedoms, but something more precious - the genes of a family of decent and benevolent people.
The Duke's mother, Dowager Duchess of Richmond, died in 1971, aged ninety-nine years and six months, probably another record. In 1928 the Duke married Miss Elizabeth Hudson, a vicar's daughter from Wendover, a choice which met with blank incomprehension from his grandfather, who suspected they would have to live 'over the shop'. While they live in Game's Seat, the small cottage with a big view, their son and heir, Lord March, lives at Goodwood, where he has been more energetic than anyone else in his efforts to show the public what would be the effects of currently proposed legislation on beautiful country houses, and to convince them that he and other landowners are there not because it is nice to live in a grand house while other people live in slums, but because he feels he is a guardian of part of the country's heritage. Duty, not choice, impels him to protect Goodwood, in the knowledge that if he doesn't, nobody else will.
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