SKINFLINT'S CITY DIARY
National Trust
An old friend in Yorkshire who says he has little time left though he's only seventy-seven worries that he cannot pass his small fortune to his unmarried daughter without estate duty risk under the seven-year rule for gifts. He's given me a disquisition on a method he has adopted Which he thinks others might be encouraged to think about.
The National Trust has a list of empty Properties neither stately homes nor weekend cottages. They have houses that were formerly farm houses, dower houses and also follies, gatehouses and so on — many in deplorable condition. My Yorkshire friend sold his own freehold house (badly in need of renovation he couldn't afford) for a heartwarming tax-free capital profit, and rented from the National Trust Up there a fair-sized farmhouse on a yearto-year basis at £400 per annum but with a three-year rent holiday as a contribution to dilapidations. The National Trust officials have given him no promises but he says he is ready to accept the chance of the National Trust taking his daughter as a substitute tenant on his death.
He has spent more thousands than he cares to admit on an element of refurbishment to his daughter's taste and is now Sitting out his days with diminished capital in his fairly luxurious easy-to-run house. On his death his remaining money --not much more than £10,000 — will be hardly touched by estate duty on passing to his daughter, whose main dowry will be the use of a fine house in which neither She nor her father has had any freehold or leasehold equity.
There has to be some faith between National Trust officers and their tenants but, other than that, this wangle (though Perhaps it shouldn't be called that) is in the general interest. With many houses of historic and national interest falling derelict some schemes might well be Worked on with Treasury blessing to benefit not more than two or three successive generations and to revitalise houses for which it is increasingly difficult to find either occupants or the money for Upkeep.
Pm all right, Jack "One mrqp profit is another's loss . . . the hitect ,Ion the collapse of houses; the 9fncers of the law on men's suits and contentionS; even the honour and practice of ministers of religion depend on our deaths and vices. No physician takes pleasure in the health even of his friends;
• • • let anyone search his heart and he will find that our inward wishes are for the Most part born and nourished at the expense of others." Walter Norton, the subject of our City caricature this week, is public-spirited and tireless, standing as a Liberal candidate against Christopher Soames a few years ago, but, alas, now allowing himself to be taken in by those zealots of Britain joining the EEC. The last paragraph of his annual chairman's statement published this week appears on a background of inspissated economic darkness : "The new export opportunities and enlarged market which membership of EEC would present may well tax existing UK machine tool
resources beyond its [sic] capacity. Should
this situation develop, then our representation of foreign suppliers with large labour and production resources would pay off handsomely as British industry gathered fresh confidence in the country's prosperity."
I don't believe that in the event Britain will join — though if we do it won't only be Walter Norton's German machinery flooding in.
Let me provide the final quotation from the same chapter of Montaigne with which I started: "Nam quodcumque suis mutatum finibus exit, continuo hoc mors est illius, quod fuit ante."
The crib says this is Lucretius and is meaningful now: "Whenever a thing changes and alters its nature, at that moment comes the death of what it was before."
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