Soap Opera or Suds Law?

After years of dereliction, Compton Verney in Warwickshire, a house partly ascribed to Robert Adam in grounds by Capability Brown, has been throbbing this Easter with visitors eager to see its new incarnation as an art gallery, housing the collection of the millionaire businessman and philanthropist Sir Peter Moores. This was once the domain of the impeccably aristocratic Verneys, but in 1921 Lord Willoughby de Broke disposed of it, and Compton Verney, by popular reputation, was never the same again. After several brief proprietorships it was requisitioned in 1940 for the wartime research effort, and thereafter fell into the hands of the War Office, which made a dreadful mess of it.

But the notion of an irreversible decline as soon as the nobs let go of it is hardly fair to the man who bought it in 1921: a Yorkshire manufacturer called Joseph Watson. Where the Mooreses made their millions from the Littlewoods business, the Watson family fortunes were founded on soap. Joseph's grandfather - also Joseph - had begun in the leather trade, but the next generation diversified, first into tallow candles, then decisively into soap. From their works in Leeds, popularly known as Soapy Joe's, they sped their soaps, especially such popular brands as Nubolic and Matchless Cleaner, across the grimy terrains of northern England. Even their eminent rivals, the Levers, had to take serious notice. And eventually Lord Leverhulme confronted the competition by the traditional method of buying it up; leaving Joseph Watson junior a very rich man.

Joseph Watson had been floated out of his grandfather's level of society on a tide of money. Sent for his education to Repton and Cambridge, he had left without a degree. Returning to work in the family business, he was managing director at 24. And now, at 48, with the Leverhulme money at his disposal, Watson was ideally placed to make his mark in society with those matchless badges of success - a peerage and a palatial home.

Watson had five splendid estates already, at Manton in Wiltshire, where his racehorses were in training, Offchurch in Warwickshire, Barlby in Yorkshire, Thorney in Cambridgeshire, and Sudbourne in Suffolk, but none of these could signal as Compton Verney could that he had arrived. The title he chose when awarded his peerage in the new year honours of 1922 (one of Lloyd George's, I fear) was Lord Manton of Compton Verney: the Compton Verney as a reminder that he owned an eagerly coveted house; the Manton, after a racing stables in Wiltshire, perhaps to commemorate a recent third in the Derby and first in the Grand Prix de Paris.

But riches and fine possessions, in the higher reaches of Edwardian society, were not in themselves enough. An uneasy companionship was developing between aristocrats who had the class but not the money and plutocrats who had the money but not the class. That, as J Mordaunt Crook establishes in The Rise of the Nouveaux Riches, which is where I first came across Watson, produced a kind of status anxiety one answer to which very often was hunting. Crook cites Surtees' jumped-up Mr Puffington: "Above all, Puff felt that he was a new man in the country, and that taking the hounds would give him weight".

Some of the arrivistes came to hunting late in life and exhibited an incompetence gleefully sniggered at behind aristocratic hands. But Watson was no such novice. He had hunted with the Bramham Moor while living in Yorkshire. So when he enlisted, even before he moved in at Compton Verney, with the Warwickshire hunt, they could take it that he knew what he was doing.

But on March 13 1922, while out with the Warwickshire, Watson fell from his horse. His son, who was close behind him, thought he had broken his neck, but a medical examination established that he had died from a heart attack. He was buried in his hunting clothes; one of his jockeys made a cross of flowers in racing colours to lay on the grave. He was just 49. As the coroner sadly observed at the inquest, he had barely had time to enjoy his seat in the Lords, and he hadn't even moved in to Compton Verney, which he was having refurbished.

I'm not quite sure of the moral of this, though it clearly relates very neatly to the teaching that pride comes before a fall. Apart from that, perhaps all we need is the preacher's reflection on man's mortality in the book of Ecclesiastes: "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."