The brothers Strutt

True to its title, the weekly British magazine Country Life does indeed cover the pleasant and unpleasant realities of rural life, but not comprehensively. My native North Wales, where sheep graze on bleak, rain-swept uplands, appears far less often in the magazine’s thick, glossy pages than do the lush, bucolic counties of Southern England.

Without apparent irony, a large house appeared on the cover of the 16 September 2009 issue of Country Life under the headline “Smaller Country Houses.”

For you see, Country Life bills itself as “the essential weekly read for those who are passionate about the British countryside, fine art, gardening and property.” Half its pages are devoted to ads for expensive houses, preferably within commuting reach of London. As if to emphasize that editorial penchant, the magazine’s annual issue on what it calls “smaller country houses” typically shows off a far-from-small house on the cover.

Among the magazine’s regular advertisers is a real estate company called Strutt & Parker . Founded in 1885 by Edward Gerald Strutt and Charles Alfred Parker, the company now has an extensive and international portfolio of properties and services. Although you might not have heard of Edward Gerald Strutt, you certainly know his oldest brother, John William. In 1873, on the death of the brothers’ father, John became the third Baron Rayleigh of Terling Place. By then, he had already embarked on a successful scientific career that would culminate in his being awarded the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Terling Place as seen from a hot-air balloon. CREDIT: Essex Balloons

Terling Place, which lies about 70 kilometers northeast of central London, remains the seat of the Lords Rayleigh. The otherwise impressive symmetry of the house and gardens is broken by the absence of a west wing that mirrors the east wing. It was in the west wing, since gutted by fire and demolished, that Lord Rayleigh had his lab and where he discovered argon.

I knew of Lord Rayleigh’s family connection to Strutt & Parker, but until a chance glance at one of the company’s ads in the Wall Street Journal jogged my memory, I hadn’t thought to investigate. I found out that of the second Baron Rayleigh’s six children who survived to adulthood, only John and Edward merited entries in the Dictionary of National Biography and its modern equivalent, Wikipedia.

Edward was notable not just for founding a successful company. In 1876, when John was working as a physicist at Cambridge University, Edward took over the management of the family’s farms at the age of 22. He developed an efficient system of large-scale dairy farming that entailed planting protein-rich alfalfa as cattle fodder and routinely testing cattle for tuberculosis. During World War I, when German U-boats threatened to stifle Britain’s food imports, the British government called on Edward’s expertise to raise domestic food production.

Curious about the two brothers’ relationship, I consulted the biography of Lord Rayleigh written by his son, Robert John Strutt , who also became a physicist and who succeeded his father to the barony. I found only one mention of Edward. It merely recorded his taking over the family’s estate.

But I did discover that John had a keen interest in agriculture. And it was he, not Edward, who first introduced artificial fertilizer to the family’s farms.