Desperate to get his political mitts on the crucial countryside vote in next month’s General Election, Keir Starmer popped up in Lancing, West Sussex this week, waxing lyrical about his childhood, amid ‘rolling pastures and beautiful chalk hills’, just across the county border in Surrey.
Back in the 1970s, Sir Keir told his audience at Lancing Parish Hall on Bank Holiday Monday, he had played football on a pitch shared with grazing cows and even earned his first pocket money clearing stones for local farmers.
‘The togetherness of the countryside. That is the best of British,’ the Labour leader declared, no doubt trying to forget that Labour won only two rural seats at the last General Election.
But if Sir Keir is really determined to big up his rustic credentials to voters, the wonder is that he hasn’t gone further. A gentle rummage in the archives by the Mail this week has lifted the lid on a joyously bucolic familial past featuring a long line of gun-toting Starmer men who served as gamekeepers to the landed gentry while living on one of Surrey’s finest country estates.
Curiously, Sir Keir made no mention, on Monday, that barely a century ago his forebears were shacked up in a castle boasting views across the Surrey North Downs.
Marden Castle, a gothic turreted folly situated on a hill in Sir Walpole Greenwell’s country estate. The castle was ‘absolutely square with windows all round’ and with a six-roomed cottage at the side
The £30,000-a-year Woldingham School for girls in Surrey. Alumni include actresses Vivien Leigh and Carey Mulligan
Sir Keir with his parents Rodney and Josephine on his wedding day to Victoria Alexander in 2007
Or that one of his ancestors, another through-and-through rural man, was a leading light in the local Conservative association, a passionate fund-raiser for the party and a decorated war hero who once wrestled a shotgun from a pheasant poacher. On another occasion, a German former U-boat submariner made off with seven of the family’s finest chickens before being caught and handed over to the police for punishment.
More, in a moment, of this delightful and fascinating pastoral, for Sir Keir boasts a family tree stretching back to 18th Century Lincolnshire where the Labour leader’s family worked as agricultural labourers in hamlets surrounding the town of Spilsby.
Sir Keir’s great-great grandfather, George Starmer, was born in 1854 in the Lincolnshire hamlet of Mavis Enderby which even today has a population of only around 200.
Like his father before him George worked as a gamekeeper, eventually moving north to Yorkshire to work on land belonging to Castle Howard, the magnificent stately pile which was home to the Dukes of Norfolk and appeared in two adaptations of Brideshead Revisited for TV and film, as well as the first series of the Netflix drama Bridgerton.
While George and his wife Matilda moved around farms and estates in Yorkshire, one of their eight sons, Gustavus Adolphus Starmer, moved south to Surrey where he took up a position as gamekeeper at Marden Park, a vast country estate nestling in a chalky valley in the North Downs, which by the turn of the twentieth century belonged to wealthy stockbroker and baronet, Sir Walpole Greenwell.
During the First World War, Gustavus was a driver in the Army Service Corps but was invalided out and sent home. For a while he worked as the estate carter, fetching coal by horse and cart from nearby Woldingham station but soon returned to game-keeping.
In 1916, he and his wife, Katherine, and their five children, including Sir Keir’s grandfather Herbert, moved into Marden Castle, a gothic turreted folly situated on a hill in Sir Walpole’s country estate overlooking what the 19th century historian Lord Macaulay described as a ‘garden of Eden’.
It is said that Emperor Louis Napoleon, nephew of Napoleon, was a visitor to Marden Park while in exile in England and used the Starmer family’s future home as a hunting lodge.
Major Gustavus Adolphus Starmer, Sir Keir’s great-uncle, who founded the Young Conservatives in the Surrey village of Godstone
Sir Keir’s great-great grandfather, George Starmer, with his grandson Edward David Starmer. George was born in 1854 in the Lincolnshire hamlet of Mavis Enderby and worked as a gamekeeper
Gustavus and his wife Katherine. During the First World War, Gustavus was a driver in the Army Service Corps but was invalided out and sent home
Bert Starmer recounted his memories of living in the castle for a 1977 recording made by the The Bourne Society, a local history group covering north-east Surrey.
The castle, which was built as a ‘shooting box’ in the early nineteenth century, said Bert, was ‘absolutely square with windows all round’ and with a six-roomed cottage at the side.
‘The walls of the big room were covered with portraits of Stock Exchange celebrities,’ he said in the interview which was reproduced in the society’s 1978 journal.
‘There must have been 50 or 60 such pictures, a rather odd decoration for such a place. There was the most ornate fireplace and the floor was of wood. There were stairs leading up through the middle of the floor to the middle bedroom from which one could reach the turreted tower.’
According to Bourne Society chairman Roger Packham: ‘The castle was originally built as a hunting lodge in the early 19th century and the estate needed to accommodate gentlemen’s shooting parties.
‘It stood on a hill on the southern edge of the estate and had lovely views from there looking south.’
It’s strange that while trying to entertain his Lancing audience this week, Sir Keir didn’t think to draw on Bert Starmer’s charming account of life in Marden Park.
Could it be that he feared city-dwelling metropolitan Labour voters might wince at the wholehearted way the Starmer ancestors had embraced the fox-hunting, cap-doffing ways of the countryside that would sit so uneasily with class warriors?
Sir Keir’s grandfather’s earliest memory was of being given a dressing down by his father for killing a rabbit in a gin-trap – a type of spring-operated trap made illegal in 1958. He told how the family got their water from a spring and kept rabbits as well as a tame fox which lived in a shed.
‘The fox was with us for about three years but my father shot it after it bit my younger brother, Reg,’ recalled Bert.
Another time, his father Gustavus brought home a pair of young badgers and the children tried, unsuccessfully, to rear them. They were later sent to live at London Zoo.
Bert recalled how looking after pheasants on his ‘beat’ meant that his father ‘would kill or trap practically everything that walks, ran or flew including rabbits, badgers, owls, moles, jays and magpies.’
On one occasion his father shot what he thought was a sparrow hawk but turned out to be a hen peregrine falcon which was stuffed by a taxidermist and sent to a museum.
Foxes, however, were out of bounds.
‘This was hunting country and shooting foxes might have got father the sack,’ said Bert.
The family’s employer, Sir Walpole, he added, had the reputation of being a ‘pig’ but his son Bernard Greenwell was ‘a very fair employer’ who kept his pocket full of ten-shilling notes to reward good service.
A newspaper article from an August 1934 edition of the Surrey Mirror, with the headline ‘a happy rural gathering’, details the annual summer fete hosted by Sir Bernard which was filled with ‘abundant enjoyment’ and no doubt much doffing of caps.
Sir Keir Starmer visits a cafe in Lancing Parish Hall while on the election campaign trail in Sussex on Monday
During his visit, Sir Keir spoke about his childhood, amid ‘rolling pastures and beautiful chalk hills’, just across the county border in Surrey
A garden produce competition saw the Starmers picking up prizes for their potatoes, cabbages and carrots as well as sweet peas.
According to Roger Packham of The Bourne Society: ‘We already knew of the Starmers but it was interesting when Sir Keir came to prominence and that connection was made. Obviously they were quite a go-ahead family. Even as a gamekeeper, his great-grandfather made a name for himself.’
Sadly, the castle was destroyed during World War Two. According to some sources it was destroyed by an air raid. But Bert Starmer said it was blown up by Canadian troops stationed at Marden Park.
Today, all that remains of the site is a pile of stones largely hidden by undergrowth, while the main Jacobean-style house in Marden Park itself is now home to £30,000-a-year Woldingham School for girls, alumni include actresses Vivien Leigh and Carey Mulligan.
Only one very old and very hazy photograph is thought to survive of the castle along with an etching by famed English landscape painter John Hassell completed in 1820.
Bert Starmer went on to become an agricultural wheelwright and married his childhood sweetheart Doris. Bert’s son Rodney, who ran his own tool company, became a staunch Labour supporter who, according to locals, used to plaster the windows of the family home with Labour posters at election time – an incongruous sight in an area which has been under Tory control for over a century.
Rodney and his wife Josephine named their son, the second of four children, after Labour leader Keir Hardie.
Interestingly, the Left-wing leanings of this branch of the Starmer family were in direct opposition to those of Sir Keir’s grandfather Bert’s older brother, Gustavus Edward – named after his gamekeeper father – who as a young man, founded the Young Conservatives in the nearby village of Godstone and, in later life, became Chairman of the Godstone branch of the Conservative Association.
He and his wife Ena, who became the Conservative Association’s honorary secretary, organised jumble sales and bazaars to raise money for the party.
So much for Sir Keir’s comment this week that ‘This England has always felt far removed from Westminster!’
Major Gustavus Starmer, who served in Italy with the Surrey Yeomanry during the Second World War and spent 25 years in the Territorial Army, regularly hosted meetings at Curds Tea Rooms near his Godstone home – a stone’s throw from Marden Park. At one such meeting in 1958, he lamented the low turnout of voters amid speculation that many people didn’t bother to vote, so certain were they of a Tory victory.
More than half a century on, his great-nephew’s party faces the same blue wall. Godstone lies at the heart of the East Surrey constituency which has been held by the Conservatives since 1918.
The latest incumbent, Claire Coutinho, was elected in 2019 with a majority of 24,000 after taking close to 60 per cent of the vote – three times as many as Labour polled.
While Sir Keir has often made much of his hard-up, working-class childhood, he has focused on the ‘small town’ of Oxted where he grew up with his parents rather than his family’s rustic life.
His reticence might in part be explained by the fact that, traditionally, Labour has depended on city-dwellers for support, a mistake which became all too clear at the last General Election when the party, under Corbyn, emerged with MPs in just two out of 124 rural – classified as ‘village or smaller’ – constituencies; Hemsworth and North Durham. Labour support in rural areas has been on the decline for the past 20 years.
In 2021, the left-wing Fabian Society went as far as admitting that ‘Labour has a rural problem’ and warned ‘there is no route to government without representing rural communities and improving Labour’s vote share in rural seats.’
Hardly surprising then that, last year, Labour decided to pledge to ‘respect’ rural communities. Warming to this theme in Lancing on Monday, Sir Keir said that ‘anyone who thinks there’s no struggle outside of our cities, let me tell you – they know nothing of the countryside.’
But in the staunchly-Conservative village of Godstone this week, voters appeared unaware of his speech – let alone his links to the area.
‘I had no idea Keir Starmer had any connections with Godstone,’ said 59-year-old Denise Sacker, who runs Willow’s Dog Grooming in a courtyard next to the village duck pond.
‘I certainly didn’t know he and the Labour Party are supposed to be supporting rural communities. I think it’s Conservative around here.’
At the nearby White Hart pub, 58-year-old builder Andrew Weir echoed her comments, saying: ‘It would take a lot to change the way people vote in this part of the world.’
And 42-year-old HR manager, Leah Thatcher, no relative of the late former Prime Minister, said: ‘If Mrs Thatcher was standing now, 100 per cent I’d be voting for her.’
If Sir Keir has his heart set on winning over the Conservatives rural heartlands, then he might want to liven up future speeches with a dollop of his family’s own colourful Arcadian past.