Noël Coward first observed the upper classes in Rutland

Oliver Soden, in his Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward, relates how The Master first observed the upper classes as a young house guest at Hambleton Hall in Rutland.

There, he says, Eva Astley Cooper, who fancied herself as "a kind of Ottoline Morrell of the Midlands", had established an artistic salon, and it was this that the young Coward was invited to join:

Later in the war the Hall became a military hospital, and not until the 1920s would Hamilton start to welcome its more distinguished guests, by which time Noël would visit as one of London theatres brighter stars. 

For now he was an awkward teenager recently discharged from a sanatorium and hosted in the spirit of doing a friend a favour. Ever adaptable, he could perform the role of country-house gentleman as easily as he could the cockney page boy or the adolescent muse to a bohemian painter, and he spent much of his time out of doors at Mrs Astley Cooper's maternal insistence that he breathe the clean air (hunting ruled supreme). 

He delighted at the new luxuries, and was perhaps set to entertain the guests amid the mesh of cigarette holders and the clink of champagne saucers. He was able to drink in a way of life both foreign and fascinating, scrutinising the English upper classes on their home turf, in all their tweets and traditions 

One characteristic of his country-house plays, for which Hambleton was an early model, is his ability to exist affectionately and easily within his onstage world while simultaneously commenting on it from the outside. 

It was as if he had opened the front of the hall on hinges like a doll's house to see the goings on behind from, the servant's bedrooms in the attic to the steamy kitchen beneath, and, between the two, the corridors of spare bedrooms, fires lit in each, in which guests would sleep beneath luxurious linen and, who knows, perhaps pad from one to the other in the dead of night.

In his play The Young Idea (1920), he would describe the English hunting country, where “immorality is conducted by rules and regulations”.

I particularly like it when Soden writes:

Mrs Astley Cooper, now aged sixty-one, lived at Hambleton Hall, a grand Victorian pile built on the centre of the Hambleton Peninsula, overlooking Rutland Water.

This suggests he has no more time than Lord Bonkers for the Rutland Water truthers, who insist that it did not exist until the 1970s.