Lady Gertrude Jane Jane Douglas

7 September 2009:

This week we go to Victorian England, where Lady Rolle of Bicton defames her head gardener…

“On the whole, employers got the employees they deserved – and sometimes very much better. Often badly managed, without clear instructions or consultation, head gardeners ran a large and efficient operation in return for neither recognition nor understanding. In one famous instance – still quoted as an authority in cases of defamation – an employer said something about her gardener which she knew to be false and ended up in court. The background to this case, called Barnes v. Rolle, was James Barnes’s tenure of nearly thirty years as head gardener at Bicton in Devon, during which time he developed Lord and Lady Rolle’s gardens into a mid-Victorian cynosure. William Robinson [influential editor of “The Garden” magazine] attested in court that they were second to none in England. Then Barnes was obliged by illness to retire, at fairly short notice. The widowed Lady Rolle was understandably piqued and, rather foolishly, made derogative remarks about him in a couple of letters she wrote shortly afterwards. In one she told a member of the public who had written to ask if he could visit the gardens that she did not want to take up the time of her new gardener with such visits because ‘everything in her garden and hothouses and greenhouses and arboretum are left in such a neglected state’. A keen attorney took up the case on Barnes’s behalf, but Lady Rolle did not take the matter seriously enough to reply to his letters and, as a result, Barnes’s barrister obtained judgement in default of her entering a defence. A hearing was called to assess the quantum of damages which, in those days, was always decided by a jury. Lady Rolle’s counsel invited the members of the jury to show their disapproval of the action by dismissing the claim with token damages of one farthing. Barnes’s lawyer replied that ‘persons in high stations were to be respected, but when they forgot what was due to those who had faithfully served them they became contemptible’. Barnes was awarded £100.”

Charles Quest-Ritson in “The English Garden: A Social History”, Chapter 4, pp. 214-5. Quest-Ritson quotes his source as “The Gardener’s Chronicle” of 1869.