Keeping Alive a 100-Year English Passion

LONDON —  Every Thursday, in deepest Derbyshire, Devon and Dorset, thousands of normally sedate people eagerly open the latest issue of a glossy magazine aimed at a particularly English passion.

This is Country Life, for 100 years the prime purveyor of what is sometimes called the “genteel pornography” of the English country house advertisement.

The magazine has its weekly society pin-up--the “girls in pearls”--well-bred and well-covered young women whose engagements have been announced or who are just, well, pretty.

But most readers will readily acknowledge that what they really want to see are the first 20-odd pages; the ads offering tantalizing pictures of every sort of graceful country property, from the Georgian rectory dripping with wisteria, to vast rolling acreage with paddocks and ponds.

One recent offering was an “exquisite moated house” with four principal bedrooms, a self-contained three-bedroom apartment, a gun room and swimming pool--just 50 minutes south of London.

There was a five-bedroom Regency house “set in its own sheltered valley just inland from the sea” in Devon. House and 67 acres cost “in excess” of $1 million.

As the French love their food, and Italians their opera, the English love their houses. The grand country house of the 16th through the 19th centuries is one of Britain’s great contributions to architecture.

Country Life readers, “are quite a varied lot--unified by an enjoyment of quality,” the magazine’s editor, Clive Aslet, said in a recent interview. “And they tend to have the money to be able to afford it.”

Cabinet minister Michael Heseltine, a very wealthy man, is already the owner of a country house. But he dreams too.

“When my husband comes home on Friday night, the first thing he wants to see is Country Life and he lies in the bath and reads it,” his wife, Anne, told the BBC. “It always looks sort of damp and crumpled by the time he’s finished with it.”

The mythology of the rural idyll--not the kind that involves sweat and manure--is what Country Life sells for 2 pounds--about $3.20--to 41,000 enthusiasts each week. Uncounted others leaf through it in doctors’ and dentists’ waiting rooms.

There are articles about dogs and horses; about the latest antiques sales and what other gardeners are planting in their herbaceous borders; about shooting, hunting and fishing.

“During the Gulf War, a colonel from the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars wrote to say that he kept a copy of the Country Sports edition in his tank,” Aslet wrote recently.

Sir Hardy Amies, fashion designer to Queen Elizabeth II, was asked by the BBC if Country Life had snob appeal.

“Yes, thank God,” he replied. “It’s an upper-class magazine.”

But it is not just England’s squirearchy that has kept Country Life in business for 100 years.

Two world wars and the advent of inheritance tax have changed life in the most privileged purlieus. The servants are gone, and owners of many stately homes now make ends meet by opening them to paying visitors or turning them over to the National Trust.

But there is plenty of new money around, and it often wants to live like old money.

Roger Taylor, drummer with the rock band Queen, has been reading Country Life since the 1970s and says he bought five houses through the ads.

Country Life’s first issue, Jan. 8, 1897, carried one page of ads for eight staggering houses, offering 40 bedrooms, stabling for 35 horses, 20,000 acres--and “nearly the whole of a very picturesque village.” Four pages were lavished on coverage of the six pet dogs of the Princess of Wales--the future Queen Alexandra.

The magazine, founded by a businessman and a former law clerk, quickly became a valuable real estate marketplace. Agent Knight Frank bought another agency in 1912 just to get its hold on the magazine’s right-hand front pages. Knight Frank advertises in that enviable space to this day.

Aslet realized Country Life was more than a magazine when “a distinguished professor of art history described his almost erotic excitement on receiving Country Life through the letter box. ‘I smell it,’ he whispered.”

“The imagination of the English affluent classes is fixed less on sex than on homes,” Aslet wrote in The Sunday Telegraph. “This may be why people sometimes refer to Country Life’s advertisement pages as property pornography.”