The class quiz
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Noël Coward (1899-1973) was an actor, playwright and composer. His light comedies – such as Private Lives (1930) and Blithe Spirit (1941) – are set in upper-class circles and wittily comment on social mores. His song ‘The Stately Homes of England’, which gently pokes fun at the rich, comes from his 1938 musical Operette. It is actually a parody of a poem written in 1827 by Felicia Hemans and published in Blackwood’s Magazine:
The stately Homes of England,
How beautiful they stand,
Amidst their tall ancestral trees,
O’er all the pleasant land ...
When the Labour government was elected in Britain in 1945, it taxed the rich so heavily that many had to sell their vast country mansions and estates to pay inheritance tax. Many of these ‘stately homes’ then passed into the hands of such organisations as the National Trust and so can be visited today by the general public.
