It took some time for the counter revolution to marshal its troops. When it did, it was soon clear just how much, particularly in terms of living memory, had been lost in the interim. The extent of the wreckage first really impinged on the public consciousness with an exhibition organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London – the Destruction of the English Country House – which opened its doors in March 1976. It appeared that, in the previous half century, literally hundreds of manor houses and industrialists’ mansions, noblemen’s castles and cottages ornées, had been smashed to smithereens by the demolition men without the slightest opposition from the authorities. Magnificent palaces designed by our greatest architects, dazzlingly important works of art, had been destroyed through fashionable indifference. For the first time, the British public experienced a sense of shock at the mindless destruction of their own heritage. And that shock soon turned to anger at the so-called planners who had let it happen. Most of the conservation groups operating today date their existence from that revelation. It was part of a general awakening which, if it never managed to invade the closed citadel of the theatrical intelligentsia, nevertheless did succeed in reviving interest in those customs that had vanished so recently. John Hawkesworth had already defied the accepted wisdom of the day with his enormously successful television drama series, Upstairs Downstairs, and all around there were suddenly articles and books and pictures to be seen and examined. Diaries and old photographs were unearthed and published, people of every rank in their sixties, seventies and eighties found themselves authorities on a forgotten civilization. In 1980, out of this rediscovery of a lost England, came Isabel Colegate’s The Shooting Party, which took the whole debate to another level.

As the screenwriter for Gosford Park, it is no secret that I owe much to Isabel Colegate. I had of course seen the film of her novel when it came out and I remain absolutely convinced that, without it, the seed of the idea behind my script would never have been allowed to germinate. The balance of my own work is different, the characters below stairs in my story occupy if anything more screen time than those above and the film was an examination of how those houses ran in a way that The Shooting Party is not. But now that I have at last read the novel, I understand much more clearly than I did how great is my debt to her.

Isabel Colegate took a world which others had begun to explore and looked beyond their fascination with the outward appearance of this formalized existence to the reasoning behind it. She does not condemn but instead invites us simply to examine this forgotten race with an open mind. We are by no means obliged to surrender to some BBCesque cliché and think harshly of everyone among the privileged characters while we praise all those at the mercy of their spoiled whims. Her message is much more sophisticated than that. In this extraordinary book, the author does not seek to judge other times by means of inappropriate, modern values. Nor is it just the duties and rituals of that way of life that are being revisited and examined. Here, she looks behind the glamorous and ordered curtain of post-Edwardian luxury to find the private motives, the dreams and the frustrations of the individuals, from both sides of the social divide, who were living and serving it.