From Hitler to girls in pearls

I’ve heard it said that the ‘countryside’ is an urban idea, a place invented by the late Victorians in order to escape industrialisation. If so, we’re craving it more than ever. Surveys suggest 80 per cent of us now dream of living in a rural idyll. Since foxhunting was banned, riding to hounds has never been more prevalent. Suddenly five million people — most of them city dwellers — are tuning into The Archers, and viewing figures for Countryfile are higher than for The X Factor.

But perhaps the most revealing indicator of the allure of the countryside is the enduring appeal of Country Life magazine, which was founded in 1897 and is currently the subject of a three-part documentary on BBC2. It has seen its circulation rise inexorably in recent years despite remaining — just as it always was — a civilised and decorous magazine, best known for its ‘girls in pearls’ frontispiece and all that glossy country-house ‘property porn’.

Its eccentric tendencies endure — as befits the bible of the British aristocracy. When I worked there in the first half of the 1990s, the editor came up with an idea to review the latest Jaguar from an aesthete’s perspective. I was asked to set it up and so rang Sir Roy Strong, the magazine’s go-to aesthete, only to be told he couldn’t drive. I went back to the editor to report this seemingly insurmountable obstacle. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘you do the driving and Sir Roy can do the describing.’ Weirdly, it worked.

Pitching up at Country Life was like stepping into an Evelyn Waugh novel. Everyone seemed to have an unpronounceable name (as in Cholmondeley, pronounced Chumley). I found myself cast as William Boot in Scoop, the inept young hack whose affected style was typified by the sentence ‘Feather–footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.’