Who were gentlemen in the nineteenth century?

The involvement of landowners on boards of manufacturing and commercial companies was complemented by the continuing movement of industrial and commercial wealth into land and an increase in intermarriage between the classes. By 1830, London bankers and merchants such as Lloyd, Baring, Drummond and the Rothschilds, brewers such as Barclay, Hanbury and Whitbread had bought into land, as had wealthy lawyers. Entry into land through purchase or through marriage continued after 1830 at very much the same rate as in the previous century. Later in the century industrialists such as Tennant, Armstrong, Coats and Wills bought into land. This can be explained by the continued status land brought since alternative and more profitable investment outlets were available. How typical these industrial magnates were is questionable since entry into the landed elite remained remarkably restricted. Most sons of manufacturers inherited the family firm not a country mansion.[1]

The cultural blending of the privileged social classes was marked by a reassertion of the status of the ‘gentleman’ with its associated life-style.[2] Tocqueville had noted this process in the 1850s

...if we follow the mutation of time and place of the English word ‘gentleman...we find its connotation being steadily widened in England as the classes draw nearer to each other and intermingle. In each successive century we find it being applied to men a little lower in the social scale...[3]

What characterised a ‘gentleman’ was instinctively known and defined though their very indefinability.[4] This inherently vague notion had long marked a fundamental status divide in society and, as the number of manufacturers and merchants increased so it took increasing significance in social control. The relatively small size of the peerage compared to the large manufacturing and commercial classes meant that even the admission of their most wealthy representatives into the peerage could only operate as a mechanism of social control if the peerage continued to be associated with the more informal and flexible concept of the gentleman. Acceptance as a gentleman by those who were already recognised as gentlemen defined a person as someone who mattered socially and politically. The fact that the status could be given or withdrawn without justification by influential social circles made it a subtle and effective mechanism of social control.

The life-style of the gentleman, therefore, had to be accommodated to the practices of the manufacturing and commercial classes. The round of dining and visiting in the great country houses, the meetings of the Quarter Sessions, and rural pursuits such as fox-hunting and racing were already integrated into the London-based ‘Season’ of activities in which all members of ‘Society’ participated. After 1830, this became increasingly more formalised and acquired a new authority over those who regarded themselves as gentlemen. Davidoff is undoubtedly correct when she states that

Society can be seen as a system of quasi-kinship relationships that was use to ‘place’ mobile individuals during the period of structural differentiation fostered by industrialisation and urbanisation.[5]

In this period ‘Society’ was rapidly growing in size and directories listing the families of gentlemen found a growing market. In 1833, John Burke published the first edition of his genealogical directory of county families: initially called Burke’s Commoners, it was subsequently given the more acceptable title of Burke’s Landed Gentry. The 1833 volume listed 400 county families, the qualification for inclusion being possession of at least 2,000 acres of land. The 1906 volume had grown to 5,000 families, of whom 1,000 were of industrial background. Burke’s General Armory was published in various editions from 1842 and listed all those families claiming the right to bear heraldic arms. Most of the 60,000 families included in the definitive 1844 edition owned little or no land. Such were the changes that were occurring to Society.

Presentation at court was regarded as central to the life of a gentleman and his family. By 1850, it was the essential entré into Society and the needs of the newcomers were met by the publication of manuals of instruction and by Certificates of Presentation.[6] The London Season, together with such events as yachting at Cowes and grouse-shooting on the Scottish moors, were central features of the life-style of the gentleman. It was, however, the Victorian public school that forged a cultural unity between the landed classes and the newcomers. The educational changes initiated by Thomas Arnold at Rugby were intended to produce ‘Christian Gentlemen’, a blend of the traditional notion of the gentleman with the humanitarianism of evangelical Christianity. The public school reforms of the 1860s led to the formation of the ‘Headmasters’ Conference’ as the central forum through which the major schools could exert control and influence over the lesser schools. The rise of new men aspiring to social leadership, the expansion of the number of suitable posts in government service and the increasing use of competitive examinations for recruitment, all reinforced the benefits of a public school education. By the 1870s, the route to top positions via public school and Oxbridge had been established.

The code of gentlemanly behaviour passed on through the public schools defined what was ‘done’ and what was ‘not done’. Its central assumption was that the gentleman had certain definite duties and obligations towards other members of society who had a corresponding obligation to defer to the ‘natural’ superiority of the gentleman. This marked a restoration of the ‘bonds of dependency’ that had existed in the eighteenth century but within an industrial and urban context. Deferential behaviour was expected of subordinates as a sign of the legitimacy of the prevailing patterns of inequality. The public school ethos was, in part, a response to the reforms of recruitment and promotion in the civil service, the law and the army but it ran counter to the rationality, efficiency and functionality of trade and industry. In some respects, the ethos articulated by public schools represented a balance between the rationalised organisation of economic change and traditional power, a compromise between landed and entrepreneurial ideals.

The dominance of the values of the gentleman and the associated cult of amateurism has been cited in the context of the arguments about entrepreneurial decline after 1870.[7] A.J.P. Taylor explained Britain’s decline

The simplest answer, which remains true to the present day, was the public schools. They taught the classics when they should have been teaching sciences.[8]

This view that ‘gentlemanly’ culture was privileged over science and technology and that middle-class entrepreneurship was diluted by aping the values and lifestyle of landed society is at the heart of this interpretation of decline. The constant flow of successful businessmen from the ungentlemanly field of trade and industry to the more acceptable fields of politics and the land is held to have resulted in a haemorrhage of talent. In fact, the attendance by the children of businessmen at public schools did not produce a drift from business life. Many manufacturers saw the creation of a successful family business as the first step in a longer-term strategy of establishing a landed family. Once they had accumulated sufficient wealth, successful businessmen would become ‘gentlemen’, with country seats, perhaps even a knighthood or peerage, seats in Parliament for themselves or their Oxbridge educated sons. They ceased to be ‘players’ in the entrepreneurial field and became ‘gentlemen’. The major problem with this view is that the aristocracy had largely arisen from the world of business and had never rejected the idea of making money through capital investment and commerce was a good thing. Pre-modern values were entrenched in the new society, but there was nothing new about this and during the industrial revolution it was taken as a sign of successful entrepreneurialism. Some of the commercial elite certainly were ‘gentrified’ during the second half of the nineteenth century but they were primarily London financiers and bankers whose entrepreneurial performance remained confident well into the twentieth century.

The emphasis on Britain’s decline after 1870 had led historians to think in terms of who was responsible. As other countries industrialised, inevitably Britain’s share of global industrial production declined but the country remained highly competitive and dynamic. In 1913, Britain’s proportional share of global manufactured exports stood at 29.9% compared to Germany’s 26.5% and America’s 12.6% and London was the world’s financial centre. Compared to the rest of the world Britain remained an economic superpower. The cultural attack on entrepreneurial attitudes in late-Victorian Britain is far from convincing especially when Britain’s attitude to entrepreneurialism and business life was far less hostile than in the rest of Europe and there is little evidence that, despite the importance they attached to the classics, public schools were opposed to the teaching of science.[9]

Victorian society was characterised by the move towards unity among the privileged social classes, in terms of both class and status situations. But there was never complete integration. Landowners and the City may have come closer together but manufacturers and provincial merchants remained apart. By the 1870s, autonomous and assertive industrial dynasties were firmly entrenched in areas such as Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Cardiff and Newcastle. It was at this provincial level that manufacturers and merchants came closer together. The distinction between three privileged classes that had been self-evident in the 1830s was far less clear by 1914. Although each class was based round a particular kind of property, they entered into ever more extensive business and personal relationships with each other. Each class also included people who were not active participants in the control and use of property, but who drew their income from this and had family links with the core of their class. Such people were to be found in politics, the professions and the intelligentsia; and these occupations constituted major areas of overlap between the fringes of the three privileged classes.

---

[1] Speck, W.A., A Concise History of Britain, 1707-1975, (Cambridge Univertsity Press), (1993), pp. 59-60.

[2] In this see, Mason, P., The English gentleman, (André Deutsch), 1982 and Raven, S.A.N., The English gentleman: an essay in attitudes, (A. Blond), 1961.

[3] Tocqueville, Alexis de, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, (Harper & Brothers), 1856, p. 108, (Doubleday), 1955, pp. 82-83.

[4] For the evasiveness of the Victorians in defining ‘gentleman’ see, Osborne, Hugh, ‘Hooked on Classics: Discourses of Allusion in the Mid-Victorian Novel’, in Ellis, Roger and Oakley-Brown, Liz, (eds.), Translation and nation: towards a cultural politics of Englishness, (Multilingula Matters), 2001, especially pp. 144-149.

[5] Davidoff, L., The Best Circles, (Croom Helm), 1973, p. 15.

[6] Ellenberger, N.W., ‘The transformation of London “society” at the end of Victoria’s reign: evidence from the court presentation records’, Albion, Vol. 22, (1990), pp. 633-653.

[7] Rubinstein, W.D., Capitalism, culture and decline in Britain 1750-1990, (Routledge), 1993, pp. 102-139 examines edication, the ‘gemtleman’ and British entrepreneurship. See also, ibid, Thomson, F.M.L., Gentrification and the Enterprise Culture: Britain 1780-1980, pp. 122-142.

[8] Taylor, A.J.P., Essays in English History, (Pelican), 1976, p. 37.

[9] Ibid, Rubinstein, W.D., Capitalism, culture and decline in Britain 1750-1990, p. 49.

Families, firms and the rich

The move towards joint stock capital was linked to an increase in the levels of economic concentration. [1] In the 1880s, the hundred largest industrial firms accounted for less than 10% of the total market. However, a spate of company amalgamation led to greater concentrations in the 1890s as the increased merger activity outpaced the growth of the market. Companies were floated on the stock exchange and might then grow by taking over their competitors; or rival firms might join together to float a common holding company. The families whose firms were floated or merged at this time often retained the ordinary, voting, shares for themselves and allowed debentures and non-voting shares to be sold to the wider public. As a result, family control could be maintained on the basis of a relatively small capital investment. The flotation of firms allowed capital to be raised from outside the family circle; and the joint-stock form allowed family wealth to be diversified and made more secure.

Large amalgamation of family firms occurred in a rapid burst between 1898 and 1900, but the rate of flotation and merger remained at a high level until 1914. These were, however, often hamstrung by attempts to maintain the autonomy of the constituent family firm, leaving the large firms as merely holding companies with no real control over their subsidiaries. The desire to maintain family control was paramount and could lead to difficulties in managing the newly created company. For example, in the fusion of 59 firms that produced the Calico Printers’ Association in 1899, each of the 84 directors on the board was determined to safeguard the interest of his original company that, in the majority of cases, was still under his management.

Bramcote Hall was built by Frederic Chatfield Smith, head of Smith’s Bank in Nottingham, in the late 19^th century

However, in other cases, family firms were able to prosper. In 1848, for example, Thomas Barlow founded Barlow & Co. in Manchester, manufacturing and trading in textiles in Britain. From the mid-1850s, the firm started importing cotton from America and began exporting textiles to India and the Far East. In 1864, he founded Thomas Barlow & Bro. and during the 1870s and 1880s established his own trade agencies in Calcutta, Shanghai and Singapore to export goods from Britain, to import tea and coffee, and to acquire his own plantations in these regions. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Thomas’s eldest son John Emmott Barlow steered the family firm away from textiles to develop its interests in agency work, in the export of iron and steel, and in tea and coffee, which led to the acquisition of a bonded tea warehouse in London. In 1891, the Barlows took over the ailing textile importers Scott & Co. in Singapore and began to extend their business to coffee estates. When the crop failed in the late 1890s, business was diversified to planting rubber trees. In 1906, a number of estates combined to form the Highlands and Lowlands Para Rubber Co., with Barlow & Co. as its agents in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, while the partnership of Thomas Barlow & Bro. acted as Secretaries in England. Diversification was one route to family success but, in the case of W.D. & H.O. Wills in the tobacco industry. Family control was maintained through a combination of technical innovation and organisational change in the 1890s that reinforced the predominance of the firm and did not lead to a haemorrhage of capital and ability from the organisation into landownership and politics.[2]

Because of family loyalties and priorities, those larger companies that succeeded in adopting a more centralised structure were generally either those in which one constituent firm was considerably larger than the others or those in which a particular family managed to subordinate its fellows in the struggle for control. The families who lost out in the struggle for the fewer positions of control in the amalgamated firms were faced with the choice of either retiring into land or politics or moving into new business ventures. Families that wished to leave business often decided to sell out to a company promoter prior to the stock exchange flotation. These families sometimes retained a stake in the firm but were not involved in active control.[3] Promoters were often keen to recruit peers to the board of companies of the companies that they floated, feeling that a ‘lord on the board’ would help the sale of shares.[4] The number of the aristocracy on the board of the Great Western Railway, for example, rose from eight of the forty-nine directors in 1856-1875 to thirteen out of thrity-six between 1896 and 1915. From the 1870s, landowners joined the boards of joint-stock companies and by 1896, a quarter of all peers had directorship. Many of these men would have been invited on to a board to provide kudos but many landowners found that their directorships provided a significant supplement to their income. Companies may even have benefited from the ‘managerial’ expertise of the landowners since the managerial problems of large firms and the need for delegated administration was similar to those faced on their estates.

The declining return of agriculture as a proportion of the returns of the economy as a whole was aggravated by the agricultural depression of 1873-1896.[5] Smaller landowners were hit far more severely than the larger landowners who had been able to diversify into non-agricultural activities. The squeeze that this exerted on the smaller landowners exacerbated the growing awareness and criticism of the accumulation of wealth in land, commerce and industry.[6] The result of this controversy and criticism was the establishment of an official investigation to scotch the claim that the bulk of British land was owned by 30,000 people. In fact this backfired: the investigation discovered that the land was owned by a much smaller number of people. The results of the survey for 1873 were published in the Returns of Owners of Land (the ‘New Domesday Book’)[7] and, although there is some confusion in the various summaries of the Return, certain conclusions about the ownership of land are clear. First, 80% of land was owned by 7,000 people, of whom 4,200 in England and Wales and 800 in Scotland held 1,000 acres or more. Secondly, among these people, 363 held 10,000 acres or more and 44 had 100,000 acres or more. Most of the largest estates were in Scotland: there were a total of 35 estates larger than 100,000 acres, of which the 25 Scottish estates accounted for a quarter of the Scottish land. Thirdly, in total the large landowners held about 24% of the land, the smaller rentiers held about 55% and owner-occupiers held a further 10% with the Church of England and the Crown holding a similar amount. Finally, this national picture was repeated at local level: in East Anglia, for example, 350 people owned 55% of the agricultural land in Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire.

In terms of income from land, 2,500 people had an annual rental income of £3,000 or more in 1873 of whom 866 received an income of £10,000 or more and 76 received £50,000 or more. Sixteen people received a rental income in excess of £100,000, the largest incomes going to the Dukes of Norfolk and Buccleuch and the Marquess of Bute. There was not a perfect correlation between income and acreage. Only 7 people had both 100,000 acres and £100,000 annual income: the Dukes of Buccleuch, Devonshire, Northumberland, Portland and Sutherland, the Marquess of Bute and the Earl Fitzwilliam. The survey did not extend to the rental income derived from urban rents and the wealth of men such as the Duke of Westminster was underestimated.[8] To identify Britain’s richest landowners more closely it is necessary to include the Dukes of Norfolk and Westminster, who had large incomes from relatively small estates and six men with massive estates with less than £100,000 rental: the Duke of Richmond, the Earls of Breadalbane, Fife and Seafield, Alexander Matheson and Sir James Matheson. These fifteen people constituted the core of the British landed class. The continuing overlap between the rich and the peerage is obvious. Of the 363 people with both £10,000 income and 10,000 acres, together holding almost a quarter of Britain’s land, 246 were members of the peerage; and a further 350 peers had smaller estates.

 

Landed wealth-holders 1809-1899
	1809-1858	1858-1879	1880-1899
Millionaires	75	33	32
Half-millionaires	150	50	n/a
Total	225	83	--

This table shows the estimate by Rubinstein of the numbers of landed millionaires and half-millionaires that is those leaving land valued at £500,000 or more on their death. It is clear that the number of landed millionaires fell considerably between the first and second half of the century. It is, however, important to recognise that the holding of land through settlements and trusts tended to result in an underestimation of landed wealth in studies based on land held at death. The position of landowners in relation to wealthy merchants and industrialists was deteriorating significantly.[9] Harold Perkin has estimated that there were, in 1850, 2,000 businessmen with profits of £3,000 or more; 338 of these people received £10,000 or more and 26 £50,000 or more. [10] In 1867, the wealthiest 0.5% of the population received 26.3% of the total income. By 1880, the number of businessmen with Schedule D profits of £3,000 or more had risen to 5,000 of whom 987 received £10,000 or more and 77 £50,000 or more.

 

Top British wealth-holders outside land 1809-1914
	1809-1858	1858-1879	1880-1899	1900-1914
Millionaires	9	30	59	75
Half-millionaires	47	102	158	181
Total	56	132	217	256

By 1880, the commercial and manufacturing classes had overtaken the landed classes in economic terms. The financial sector consistently accounted for between 20 and 40% of all non-landed millionaires. Both of the main industries of the industrial revolution were well-represented among millionaires. Textiles accounted for about 10%, a slight increase from earlier in the century while metals accounted for the same percentage in both of the earlier periods and then fell away. In the later periods, the food, drink and tobacco industries together accounted for about a fifth of all non-landed millionaires, and from 1858 the distributive trades accounted for one-tenth.

The wealthy men of land, commerce and manufacturing drew closer together during the Victorian period, though landowners still tended to denigrate merchants and manufacturers as ‘middle-class’ and concerned with ‘trade’.[11] This status exclusion was eased by the existence of a vast number of clerks, shopkeepers and tradesmen who were oriented towards the commercial and manufacturing classes and appeared to form a continuous social class with them. In fact, the economic gulf between them was immense.

It was the development in the scale of business activity and the emergence of the joint-stock company that brought into existence professional and salaried managers and administrators who occupied an increasingly important position in the class system. These ‘professionals’ were distinct from manual workers by virtue of their higher earnings, the ‘career’ nature of their work and their participation in the control and surveillance of the labour process but they were distinct from the capitalists themselves. They constituted a loose middle stratum below the main areas of privilege, but enjoyed superior life chances to the majority of the working population. They were, however, dependent on the business and private actions of manufacturers and merchants and were also direct beneficiaries of the new form of property that the joint-stock company represented. Yet with the landowners, manufacturers and merchants, the intellectual property of the professions represented an important shift in the definition of property in late Victorian Britain.

---

[1] Johnson, Paul, Making the Market: Victorian Origins of Corporate Capitalism, (Cambridge University Press), 2010.

[2] Alford, B.W.E., W.D. & H.O. Wills and the Development of the UK Tobacco Industry, 1786-1965, (Taylor & Francies), 2006, pp. 304-306.

[3] Casson, Mark, ‘The economics of the family firm’, Scandinavian Economic History Review, Vol. 47, (1999), pp. 10-23.

[4] See, Jeremy, David, J., ‘Anatomy of the British Business Elite, 1860-1980’, Business History, Vol. 26, (1), (1984), pp. 3-23, Channon, G, ‘The recruitment of directors to the board of the Great Western Railway’, www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/uploads/docs/200001.pdf

[5] On the depression see above, pp. ***. See also, Channing, Francis Allston, The Truth about Agricultural Depression: an economic study of the evidence of the Royal Commission, (Longman, Green and Co.), 1897, pp. 29-52 on evidence for successful farming.

[6] Burrows, A.J., The agricultural depression and how to meet it; hints to landowners and tenant farmers: By Alfred J. Burrows, ...Reprinted, with considerable additions, from ‘The Journal of Forestry and Estate Management’, (William Rider & Son), 1882 was one, of several, self-help books.

[7] See Bateman, John, The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland, (Harrison and Sons), 1879, 4^th ed., (Harrison and Sons), 1883.

[8] Ibid, Rubinstein, W.D., Men of Property: The Very Wealth in Britain since the Industrial Revolution, pp. 193-226 provides analysis based on the Returns of Owners of Land; see especially Table 7.1, pp. 194-195.

[9] Spring, David and Spring, Eileen, ‘Debt and the English aristocracy’, Canadian Journal of History, Vol. 31, (1996), pp. 377-394.

[10] Ibid, Perkin, H., The Origins of Modern English Society 1780-1880, pp. 414-420.

[11] See, Spring, Eileen, ‘Business men and landowners re-engaged’, Historical Research, Vol. 72, (1999), pp. 77-91.