National history

Another part of Robert Hewison’s book, The Heritage Industry, is one that really picks out some interesting and revealing parts of a certain organisation’s history and how, maybe even today, despite its best efforts to really bring alive and work toward its original reasons for existence and the aims and objectives in the rural and natural environment like its Neptune campaign and modern day equivalents, the twentieth-century legacies of its attitudes and approaches to running a heritage organisation, especially its many ‘historic’ buildings that were given (or gifted) for the tax purposes of an entitled segment of Britain’s social hierarchies, makes for an insightful read.

Even though some things have changed and the quoted passage is from a book of its published time (1987), the meaning and debate remains prescient and shows, even now, facing facts and explaining (historical, certainly of the mid-twentieth century) decisions publicly is helpful to genuinely allow effective progress that may even prevent but hopefully, at the least, limit the power and influence of people and organisations (political or otherwise) of directing and assuming a know-it-all and paternalistic guiding hand to a nation that’s actually lost, not leading for meaningful societal change and improvement, at all levels.

Such is the power of the cult of the country house. A building that can only be glimpsed becomes the erotic object of desire of a lover locked out. Yet he seems unaware of his exclusion. By a mystical process of identification the country house becomes the nation, and love of one’s country makes obligatory a love of the country house. We have been re-admitted to paradise lost.

Re-admitted, that is, on visiting day. The country house is as much emblem as bricks and mortar, it has no formal architectural definition; consequently it is not possible to say how many country houses there are. The ideal house retains its contents, its parkland, at least the home estate – and its owners. The Historic Houses Association calculates that there are approximately 3,500 that retain their contents and supporting land, of which approximately 2,000 are in private hands and sustain a long-term family connection.

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That the country house has survived is largely due to a private body, the National Trust. It is a private charity, governed by an executive committee appointed by a fifty-person council, of whom half are nominees from other amenity bodies. The Trust depends on donations, admission charges and the subscriptions of its members, and income from its farms and investments. Following a recruitment drive in recent years the membership stands at 1,400,000. In return for a basic subscription of £14.40 [1987 prices!] they gain free admission to National Trust properties, and have the right to vote for those Council members who are not appointed by related organisations, though most members are content to use their membership simply to visit Trust properties.

The National Trust is the largest private landowner in the United Kingdom, with (in December 1986) 540,000 acres, 470 miles of coastline, and 292 properties open to the public, 87 of them large houses. It owns 1,181 farms and some 15,000 agricultural buildings. The National Trust for Scotland owns 100,000 acres with III properties open to the public, including 19 castles and historic houses.

In spite of its status as a voluntary organisation, however, the Trust has long enjoyed a ‘national’ position, confirmed by a succession of National Trust Acts. This private body has a highly public function. While not directly funded by the government it has a special relationship with the Treasury, both as a repository for properties and objects that are given ‘to the nation’ in lieu of tax, and because it provides a form of tax haven for private estates which avoid tax by passing to the Trust. It is run by public figures, including members of Parliament and of the House of Lords, and has access to the government through that complex network of interlocking relationships and connections that make up the self-selected aristocracy of the Great and the Good. The formal links through its constitution with other amenity bodies are doubled by personal cross-memberships and common backgrounds in the field of public service. The Trust’s present chairman, for instance, Dame Jennifer Jenkins, is married to the politician Roy Jenkins, and is the former chairman of the Consumers’ Association, and of the Historic Buildings Council for England; she has also served on the Design Council, the management committee of the Courtauld Institute and the Ancient Monuments Board. A former secretary of the Ancient Monuments Society, she became its president in 1985. The Trust’s director-general, Angus Stirling, is a former deputy secretary-general of the Arts Council and assistant director of the Paul Mellon Foundation for British Art. He is a director of the Royal Opera House and chairman of the Friends of Covent Garden. He has also served on the management committee of the Courtauld, sits on the Crafts Council and the executive committee of the London Symphony Orchestra and is a trustee of the Theatres Trust.

The National Trust has been described by one of its former chairmen, Lord Antrim, as ‘a self-perpetuating oligarchy’⁷; in spite of its large membership it has long been the fiefdom of ‘the amenity earls’, or those who would like to live like them. In his contribution to The Treasure Houses of Britain Mark Girouard has described the attitude of generations of country house owners: ‘An independent, property-owning landed class was seen as the right and natural ruling class, but their power and privileges were recognised as bringing corresponding duties.’⁸ Such is the attitude inherited by the governors of the National Trust. The Trust has the special status afforded to organisations that have been established for a long time. Yet it is not generally realised, that as it approaches its centenary, the National Trust is a quite different organisation to that which its founders intended.

The National Trust has its origins in the Commons, Open Spaces and Footpaths Preservation Society, founded in 1865, and its primary purpose was not the protection of buildings or private property, but public access to the countryside. As is now recognised, landowners regard their property as an asset to be exploited to the owner’s best advantage; with rare exceptions, any sense of a responsibility to the general community who enjoy the landscape as a source of aesthetic refreshment is secondary. The conflict is clear in the battles to preserve access to common land against enclosures for farming which the Commons Preservation Society was formed to fight. Two of the Trust's founders, Octavia Hill and Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley had close connections with John Ruskin, whose writings, deeply conservative in origin, celebrated the beauties of the natural world and raged against the pillage and pollution of nineteenth-century capitalism. Canon Rawnsley led the Lake District Defence Society’s resistance to the projection of railways through the Lakes with Ruskin's support, and Ruskin introduced Rawnsley to Octavia Hill, a prominent member of the Commons Preservation Society, whom he had helped with her schemes to improve working-class housing. In 1885 Rawnsley, Hill and the solicitor of the Commons Preservation Society Robert Hunter joined forces to protect the right of public access to the Lake District.

To the founders of the Trust, the landscape, especially that which expressed the spiritually regenerative forces of nature, rather than the civilising activities of man, was the primary value in danger. But memory, too, had a capacity for moral change, by acting as a reminder of former greatness, and the landscape could not be seen without its human associations. Accordingly, when the Trust was formally registered with the Board of Trade in January 1895 as a body intending to hold land in perpetuity, it was as ‘The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty’.

The Trust’s first acquisition was a stretch of headland above the resort of Barmouth in Wales, the small seed from which the Trust’s continuing campaign to preserve the coastline through Enterprise Neptune has grown. It acquired its first house in 1896, the Clergy House at Alfriston, but this late fourteenth-century structure of timber, plaster and thatch exactly expresses the medievalising tastes of the first members. The purchase price was ten pounds. Other small buildings followed. The only acquisition that would qualify as a country house was the early sixteenth-century Barrington Court in 1907. In that year the Trust’s inevitable responsibility for buildings as well as land was officially recognised, if only in parenthesis, by the first National Trust Act, which empowered it to promote ‘the permanent preservation for the benefit of the nations lands and tenements (including buildings) of beauty or historic interest’. The Act introduced the concept that the Trust’s property was ‘inalienable’, that is to say it could never be disposed of or taken away from the Trust, even by compulsory purchase, except by express will of Parliament. Many of the early properties acquired were small, but there were important protective acquisitions in the Lake District, and by 1914 the Trust controlled 5,500 acres.

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In the 1920s, as the original founders of the National Trust began to die off, the focus of policy started to shift. Short of funds, it was no longer eager to accept any parcel of land however small, while the impact of death duties on the great estates became a cause of alarm. In 1923 the Trust formally begged the Chancellor of the Exchequer to grant tax concessions to owners of important country houses to help them keep their properties in good repair – the first of a succession of pleas which continues to the present day – though without success. In 1931, however, the Treasury conceded an important change in the tax laws as an incentive to landowners to give property to the Trust. The 1931 Finance Act allowed land or buildings given to the Trust to escape death duties; owners or their heirs could reduce their tax liabilities by judicious gifts to the Trust, and thus keep the rest of the estate intact, while the Trust stood to gain considerable land and buildings. In 1937 the exemption was extended to cases where the donor retained a life interest in the property.

The National Trust began to adapt to the new circumstances. In 1932 it acquired a new chairman, the Marquess of Zetland, a former governor of Bengal, who had had no previous experience of the Trust, but who had the aristocratic connections that would give the Trust access to the owners of great estates who might see the advantages of passing land to the Trust. The emphasis was still on land, but at the Trust’s annual general meeting in 1934 the Marquess of Lothian proposed that the Trust should adopt a positive policy for the acquisition of country houses, and press for the creation of a fiscal scheme that would ensure their survival. In 1936 a Country House Committee was established, with the architectural writer James Lees-Milne as secretary. The Trust again failed to secure the tax advantages it would have liked country house owners to have had, but in 1937 a fresh National Trust Act confirmed the Trust’s new role as the protector of the country house.

The terms under which the 1907 Act had permitted the holding of buildings ‘of beauty or historic interest’ were altered to ‘national interest or architectural, historic or artistic interest’, and for the first time the Trust’s responsibilities were extended to furniture and pictures. The Trust was empowered to hold land and investments purely in order to generate an income that would enable it to preserve and maintain properties. Local authorities were empowered to give land or buildings to the Trust, or to contribute to the acquisition and maintenance of Trust buildings. Finally, the Act permitted the Trust to protect land or buildings it did not own by making covenants with the owners, by which the owner agreed not to fell timber or alter his buildings without the agreement of the Trust. The land did not change hands, and there was no condition giving public right of access, but the existence of the covenant did reduce the owner’s liability to death duties. As a result of the 1937 Act the Trust was able formally to launch its Country House Scheme.

The essence of the scheme was that wherever possible the Trust arranged for the owners to continue living in the house, either as tenants on a long lease, or under the terms of what is known as a ‘memorandum of wishes’, which is not legally enforceable, but gives the owner long-term security for himself and his heirs. Thus, in exchange for often quite limited rights of access to the public, the owner was able to continue his life very much as before, without the financial burden of maintaining the house in which he lived.

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By 1939 the Trust’s holdings had increased to 410 properties and 58,900 acres. In 1940, on the death of Lord Lothian, the original proponent of the scheme, the Trust acquired Blickling in Norfolk, its first property under the Country House Scheme. The need to preserve and record what was now perceived as an expression of the civilised values for which the country was fighting had become urgent.

Throughout the war the National Trust steadily acquired important properties. Invalided out of the army in 1941, the scheme’s secretary, James Lees-Milne toured the country, inspecting potential properties and talking to their owners. He kept a private diary, subsequently published, which is remarkably frank about the camp and snobbish values he brought to his work, and which he clearly shared with other members of the Trust. He records the comment of a colleague during the arrangements for the furnishing of Montacute House in 1946, who ‘remarked that the public could not of course be admitted to the house because they smelt.’⁹

For the most part, James Lees-Milne’s diaries are a melancholy account of decay, of elderly owners stranded in the hulks of their houses after the tide of social change had swept them aside and beached them, without the staff to run them or the funds to keep them afloat. The damage done by enemy action that he records is more than equalled by the wanton destruction of official and unofficial vandals. There were many Bridesheads in 1944. By the end of the war the Trust had acquired Wallington, Cliveden, Great Chatfield, Polesden Lacy, Speke Hall, West Wycombe and Lacock Abbey among other properties, so that in 1945 it controlled 112,000 acres and was responsible for nearly a hundred historic buildings.

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[…] The new Labour government was busy nationalising the mines and the railways, increasing taxes, rationing luxuries and substituting a bureaucratic order and equality for the old system of social privilege and respect. Country house owners and their allies viewed this new world with suspicion, none more so than James Lees-Milne, as he surveyed the contents of Brockhampton House, which had passed to the Trust on the death of its last owner in 1946:

‘This evening the whole tragedy of England impressed itself upon me. This small, not very important seat in the heart of our secluded country, is now deprived of its last squire. A whole social system has broken down. What will replace it beyond government by the masses, uncultivated, rancorous, savage, philistine, the enemies of all things beautiful? How I detest democracy. More and more I believe in benevolent autocracy.’¹⁰

Robert Hewison The Heritage Industry