Endangered species
From The Lord Hamilton of Dalzell Sir: I have no doubt that someone from Font and the National Trust will respond to Ross Clark's contribution ('Housing benefit for aristos', 25 September). If the views expressed in it represent those who are opposed to the election of Font candidates, we will all know where to put our votes.
The opinion that, in the 1930s, 'the Trust began its transformation into the role it ful- fils today; a housing association for bankrupt aristocrats' is very similar to that taken by the government. By its actions taken in the 1998 Finance Act to compel owners of works of art exempted from tax to open them to public access and to raise the quality of those qualifying, it is saying that the process of protecting the heritage from the ravages of inheritance tax has gone far enough. It now prefers the money, £30 million per year.
He's still there in 2010.' To cite the Marquess of Bristol as an example of how an idle cokehead could continue to live in his stately home is a libel on those many owners who handed their properties and treasures to the National Trust so that they could survive, rather than cash them in or allow their heirs to do so. If the National Trust did any disservice, it was because it disguised the calamity hanging over our heritage brought about by two world wars, which slaughtered owners' heirs and shrank the nation's wealth. It enabled the government to continue to tax without the results showing too obviously.
I suppose that the resurgence of the country's wealth might have bred a new generation of people prepared to take on 'houses which, by their very expense, doomed their creators from day one' and resume 'their decadent lifestyles'. Or, as Ross Clark says, there is always the option of the hotel, flats or golf club. In each case it would mean getting rid of the old muse- um clutter on the international art market.
I own 'a preposterous house put up in a frantic game of one-upmanship by Regency and Georgian gentlemen who kept sticking on extra wings to impress each other'. There are copious regulations which forbid anybody taking them off again. My prede- cessor was insufficiently generous to con- sider the National Trust, and its contents went to pay tax in 1961. It has now been unoccupied for 13 years, waiting for some- one intrepid enough to take it on. Now on the endangered list, along with 1,500 other historic buildings, it may finally have found a saviour. Keep at it, Ross Clark. You and Gordon Brown are winning.
Hamilton of Dalzell
Betchworth House, Betchworth, Surrey
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