We built on absolute trust
Peter Levi
PEOPLE AND PLACES: COUNTRY HOUSE DONORS AND THE NATIONAL TRUST by James Lees-Milne John Murray, £19.99, pp. 230 The National Trust is already old enough to have a complicated history. In its roots it goes back to the open-air movement of the late 19th century, and no doubt the arts and crafts movement as well. One of its founders was Canon Rawnsley, a scholar and preserver of dialect and curious custom, a friend of Tennyson and the organiser of 80 bonfires for Victoria's jubilee, all of which you could see from the heights of Skiddaw: he climbed up there that night and counted them. Indeed it is to his activities in the Lake District that we owe the survival of so much undeveloped and unspoilt landscape. As late as 1918, it was a simple hilltop and a wood near the entrance to Dovedale that were given to commemorate the fallen. Country houses came later: until a speech made by Lord Lothian in 1934, it was generally assumed that great estates would last forever. By 1939, the Trust had scarcely got beyond the attempt to preserve an entire way of life, estate and workmen and tenants and houses and great families to look after the houses; families naturally showed a certain reluctance to join in these schemes. It was the second world war that shook the tree, and the transference of wealth and population to urban centres on an unforeseen scale, leaving elderly and aristocratic owners rattling like dried peas in the shells of their magnificent houses, that brought about the vast problems with which, by and large, the National Trust honourably coped. They began as amateurs in a world of amateurs: but 15 years after the 1939 war the mere list of the grand houses they looked after filled a serious book, and by the present day they have no doubt reluctantly and regrettably become a professional body. We must thank our stars that the Trilst existed to take the sudden strain. The crucial generation was that of James Lees- Milne, who was at work for the Trust before the war and working for it again before the war was over. This book has an amazing freshness and originality; it is the record of a huge slice of our social history by one of its principal actors; it recalls a world that is now dead, though in 1930 it had hardly altered for two and a half centuries, and records with unusual charm and liveliness both people and places. It is frugally but aptly illustrated, and presented almost lightheartedly. Since it deals with 14 case histories individually, and since they overlap in time (everything happened terri- bly quickly), it is almost like a travel book, and almost like the most fascinating biography, yet the London office is never out of mind, so it is also a piece of institu- tional history. It is a thrilling read, and a unique kind of book. The idea of writing it apparently came from James Fergusson, the obituary editor of the Independent.
Of the houses treated, my own favourite is perhaps Cotehole, because of its pleasing remoteness and dependent riverside architecture. Tennyson used it to colour a ruinous castle in the Idylls of the King. But West Wycombe is an estate I have admired and loved all my life, and the battlefield of some negotiations that are enthralling to read about, and I shall value Buckling Hall in future not just as the library of some early English homilies, but as the field fought over by the redoubtable, radical, evangelical, pacifist Miss O'Sullivan and her ally Miss James the housekeeper against the barbarian excesses of the RAF. The most pleasing and unlikely of all the vignettes is that of Field Marshal Sir A. A. Montgomery-Massingberd, who was CIGS until 1936 but saved his estate for the Trust in 1939 only by his bulldog pertinacity. Gunby has the austere beauty of houses of around 1700, but it was in the way of a run- way for large bombers. Officials appeared Without notice marking trees, of which some 800 mature specimens were threat- ened, a huge Eiffel Tower popped up on the lawn, and all the ministry would do under pressure was paint it. It went in the end, and Gunby Hall returned to its isola- tion.
The nobility and courage of owners like this cannot be exaggerated. It is nice to know that the Massingberds had aesthetic connections as well as county ramifications: the Field Marshal was one of Kipling's pall- bearers, his sister-in-law was Virginia Woolf s mother's best friend, and Linden Lea by Vaughan Williams was dedicated to her and first performed at Gunby. The tra- ditional life of squires could scarcely sur- vive the evaporation of farm labourers and household servants, so the attempt of the 1930s to promote a perpetuity of that way of life was doomed. Without government concessions (in which Rupert Brooke's friend Hugh Dalton played a patrician socialist part), little or nothing could have been rescued. But the last generation of owners showed their courage by going on living in the mere parody of their old grandeurs, to the great benefit of the public and the Trust, and their nobility by handing over their wonderful estates, voluntarily and without recompense, to the British people. It would not have happened any earlier, or anywhere else.
There were difficulties about money, of course, and about entrenched agents, but at least in this book there are 14 happy endings. The style of house that used to be called a villa is still often in private hands, as it should be, but I wonder how many substantial country houses are still owned and lived in by their old families? Chatsworth, Badminton, Wilton, Berkeley Castle, Ferle, and how many others? What might happen at the best with no Trust is exemplified by Hestercombe, a huge and hideous country house that survives as the headquarters of the Taunton Fire Brigade; luckily the chief officer is a keen gardener, and has restored a very big Lutyens garden to a glorious condition. In the big land- scape gardens occupied by schools, like Stowe and Prior Park, the Trust is now showing interest or taking a hand. That is the greatest aesthetic contribution of this country in this century: in an age little visisted by the muses, we have found a way of preserving houses and whole landscapes that are the equivalent of great poems and symphonies.
Some of the last inhabitants were a rummy lot, and Mr Lees-Milne observes them wrily. The characters come across very fully, as if he were a novelist: indeed a modern Tolstoy would find this a most use- ful source book. The Trevelyans are a famous tribe, and already well document- ed, but the Hoares of Stourhead are not so well known, and of the Sackvilles of Knole readers of Vita Sacicville-West's The Edwardians can never hear enough. They are all deftly chaacterized here. I suspect that Brockhampton in Herefordshire has
been included chiefly for its quietness and its final anecdote. 'One June evening of 1947 after a storm I walked down to Lower Brockhampton at dusk. The trees were dead quiet, not even whispering.' Mr Lees- Milne met a middle-aged couple just lean- ing in silence on a gate. They came there twice a year, from Bradford, because their son's ashes had been scattered in the park. He was a pilot in the RAF, and 'After all,' they said, 'this must be the most beautiful place in England.'
Among these 14 houses, some figure in the latest National Trust news sheet of the Severn region. Hanbury Hall had an elm avenue which died in 1870: the Trust replanted with two lines of oak and one of lime, but they now see their mistake, because lime looks more like the old elm, so they are recreating the avenue in lime and moving the oaks bodily, roots and all, elsewhere in the estate, with the help of a huge machine. Charlcote has a music festival, though why not after all? The pub- lic has an unlimited appetite for upper- middle-brow culture, and that is that.
Croft Castle does not need Scottish Country Dancers, but the public does, and the presence of those breathing trees and that remarkable architecture must have a secret influence even on the British public. All the same, the trust is and ought to be essentially elitist, it ought to be run by aesthetes. The other day some baboon on the television was complaining of the way those great sprawling yews at Powis Castle spoil the line of the terraces. Such people must be kept down. In the future this book will be seen to be the best kept monument of the greatest age of the National Trust.
Vernon Scannell
Bathtime
A strange bath in a small hotel in Durham, Old-fashioned, long like a porcelain coffin, He lolls in it and lingers, Watches, with detachment, pubic hair, Sparse kelp, thin scrawl on water. He tries to recollect its dark abundance When he was young and muscular, but fails, Or, rather, he recalls it in the head alone As one remembers dates or names of people Which freeze, discarnate, in the mind. He lets his gaze Drift down to where his toes are visible, Breaking the steaming surface, and observes How long his toenails are. They seem to grow More quickly now as they, he understands, Will go on growing after he is dead. The treacherous little bastards are rehearsing. He nods and smiles a faint sour smile, And they grin back at him quite equably, Without the faintest smidgin of remorse.
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