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7.1: Parents: Longleat is thrown open to the public

Henry was now approaching what might well be regarded in retrospect as the high point of his career, in that he threw Longleat open to the public at the week-end of Easter 1949. He had in fact persuaded his friends, the Duke of Marlborough and the Earl of Warwick, to open up their own respective stately homes of Blenheim and Warwick Castle more or less at the same time. But in deference to the fact that the idea had originated from himself, and in accordance with what they all regarded as gentlemanly behaviour, they refrained from opening their own houses until the Whitsun week-end - so as to give him the advantage of all the initial publicity. And a great deal of publicity on the subject indeed there was.

Needless to say, Henry was greatly excited by the whole business. He had always regarded himself as a shy person, who was timid of intruding a personality - which he had always under-rated with misplaced modesty - upon the public at large, unless that personality display could be closely identified with the aura of Longleat. When he was acting within the aura of Longleat, his self-confidence was there in abundance. And what he was doing now was very much in that character. Envisaging himself in the role of High Priest, he was inviting the British public to become part of the temple's congregation. And the size of that congregation was going to be vastly greater than anything that had yet been witnessed within the history of Longleat.

Henry stimulated our feelings of excited participation within the whole enterprise. Over that first week-end, we all had our allotted roles to play - largely for the benefit of the media who were present in force, to cover this transition of the rôle a stately home might be expected to play within the lives of the local community. Both Daphne and Caroline had accepted to conduct the occasional guided tour, whilst the boys had been designated our duties in the car park. But the real focus was upon Henry as the ringmaster, standing on the front steps, sometimes with Daphne at his side, and smiling benignly at the queue of tourists waiting to pay the two shillings and sixpence which had been decreed as the price of entry. For those who bought the guide book - which had been written by Daphne from facts compiled by Miss Coates, the librarian - there were sometimes the autographs to sign. And even after the queues had diminished, Henry was standing there in the grounds, waving the traffic in one direction or another. He was the focal point of all attention, and he adored it.

There was indeed quite some splash of media coverage, including television. And this was the first occasion since my babyhood when I found photographs of myself in a newspaper, (I think it was the Daily Express,) posing in pretence of repairing some mechanical fault within the car engine of some pretty young girl who had been selected by the photographer for that purpose. The special interest in most other papers however, was the manner in which I had been observed receiving tips for my services in the car park from grateful members of the British public.

The receipt of tips came indeed as a great delight to us, and we were encouraged to accept them by Henry as an incentive for the keener performance of our tasks. And it meant that we were eager to get back into the car park on successive week-ends, over the course of these holidays, so as to accumulate more wealth. At the same time, I was aware how we were exposing ourselves to a certain indignity from all this publicity, which therefore caused an ambivalence in my assessment of what was happening.

The occasion when I felt the most ashamed was when I espied Mrs Stodhart, a local lady from the county set who had a boy rather older than myself at Eton, returning to her car. I rushed after her in the punctilious performance of my duties, and just managed to get my own hand before hers to the handle of her car door, so that I could open it for her entry. She looked at me coolly for a moment, and then declared: "I suppose that I ought to be tipping you?" When confronted with such bare-faced exposure of my inner motivation, I backed down, merely shaking my head as if my behaviour was more altruistic. But it made me question in my own heart whether Henry was really being quite so kind to us in sending us to work in the car park.

I expect that we all had our embarrassing experiences in one manner or another. I know that Daphne was talking about the occasion when she asked some man on the front steps if he would like her to autograph the guide book he had just purchased, and he declined the offer quite curtly - possibly wondering if she might then demand an extra two shillings and sixpence from him. And Henry found himself in trouble with the trades union for car park attendants, for giving his unskilled sons such employment. So the net result was that, by the time the Summer holidays arrived, we were given the choice as to whether we wanted to do such work, by which time we all felt that we'd had more than enough of it.

The public reaction to the opening of Longleat had in fact been predominantly favourable. And viewed retrospectively, this event can be identified not only as the launch of the stately homes industry, but also as the initial boost to Britain's post-war tourist industry. It is true there was the angle of criticism sometimes voiced that we were demeaning the whole aura of a stately home. Aunts Kate and Emma were far from certain if they approved of Henry's activities, for they were closer to the way their own father might have assessed the situation. But as Henry pointed out, The Thynne family - like everyone else - had to learn to live with the times.

Without inviting the paying public to come and see what Longleat contained, there was little prospect that we could have found other methods, at that date, to cope with the rising costs of maintenance - apart from handing it all over to the National Trust. And in Henry's eyes, that would have been tantamount to a surrender to Socialism. He had repelled that intrusive bogey, for the time being at least. And over the course of the next few years, the attendance figures peaked at a figure just over 300,000. But that figure only accounts for those who paid to visit the house. Just how many people had been enjoying a day, free of charge, in the grounds of Longleat is something difficult to calculate.