The annual Flower Show in Corsley, a village on the Longleat estate in Wiltshire, was a scene of timeless English rusticity: sultana scones, egg-and-spoon races, tug-of-war, prizes for the Best Potted Begonia, dancing in the village’s Reading Room. It was all terribly Mrs Miniver. Shelved for six years by war, the flower show returned in August 1945, on the day the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. And at the next year’s show, the villagers’ new landlord, Henry Thynne, the 6th Marquess of Bath, dropped a bombshell of his own; he told them he was selling off the village.
The reason was simple: death duties. Henry’s father, Thomas, had died without gifting the bulk of his estate to his son, who now owed the Inland Revenue $950,000 (about $136 million today) in inheritance tax. And the new Labour government was raising the top rate of tax to 95 percent. “The days of the large estates,” Henry told his neighbors, “are over.”
