Our Land at War

by Duff Hart-Davis

  Although founded in 1894, the Trust was still an embryonic organization, which had concentrated on the preservation of open countryside rather than of buildings. When Lees-Milne joined the Trust in 1936, at the age of twenty-nine, only three other male employees were working in a cramped office in Buckingham Palace Gardens. But he – a highly intelligent and personable young man, with boundless enthusiasm for architecture, literature, art and music – launched out on what he called the most enjoyable summer of his life, visiting a succession of stately homes by train or bicycle or on foot, in the ‘pioneer days of the country house enterprise’.

  Some of his encounters were humiliating. At Longleat, after a fruitless interview, Lord Bath rang a bell and ordered his visitor’s non-existent car to be brought round. He then insisted on accompanying the young man to the front door of the huge Elizabethan house, whose steps were lined by footmen in livery. ‘In place of my uniformed chauffeur,’ Lees-Milne recorded, ‘an extra footman wheeled my bicycle to the front of the steps. I shook my host’s hand, descended the perron and mounted.’

  He found more sympathy, but also greater urgency, at Stourhead in Wiltshire. The owner, Sir Henry Hoare, wished to leave the whole property to the Trust: the eighteenth-century house, its glorious gardens graced with lakes, temples, grottoes and follies, and 6000 acres of land, which encompassed 2000 acres of forest, mainly exceptional softwoods. He also promised an endowment of £150,000.

  Sir Henry, seventy-four when the war began, was an old-fashioned sort. A ‘bluff, bullish figure’, he dressed in pepper-and-salt knickerbockers, winter and summer, and wore a fawn billycock hat, which he kept on at meals. His wife Alda (‘tall, upright and tightly corseted’) had an unfortunate way with servants, who found her ‘impossibly exacting’. An idea of her temperament can be gained from her habit of using a pen with an extremely thick nib to annotate her novels in the margins and endpapers with ‘explosive interjections of indignation: “Pshaw! … What rot! … What next? … Splendid … Genius … I agree”’.

  In May 1939 Sir Henry was distressed by finding a man from the Ministry of Aviation surveying the ground for an airfield less than half a mile from his house. He implored the National Trust to stop the scheme, and after protests it was withdrawn – only for the land to be requisitioned for a military camp and a grass runway for training flights.

  As the war went on, and discussions with the Trust stagnated, the Hoares’ most pressing concern became the shortage of servants, who had been reduced from the pre-war total of ten to five. Rattling around in the huge house, quite unable to do things for themselves, the old people desperately needed help. ‘We are in terrible difficulties in carrying on here,’ wrote Sir Henry in 1942. ‘We now want a cook and a butler. We have only got a boy of seventeen, and he will shortly be called up.’ By then most of the house was shut up, or occupied by ‘a squadron of the liaison regiment … six or seven officers and about fifty men’. All the same, Sir Henry wrote piteously: ‘We are up against it now, as our only housemaid is leaving. Only a char left.’ Negotiations for the handover had begun in 1936, but there were so many points to be settled that agreement was not reached until 1947, when house and estate eventually passed to the Trust.

  Absurd as it may now seem to make such a fuss when England was fighting for its life, there is no doubt that the old Hoares were genuinely distressed. Having never had to fend for themselves, they could not cook, clean, do the laundry, light a fire, change a fuse or mend anything else that got broken.

  The realities of owning a white elephant were starkly described by the Dowager Countess of Radnor, whose home was Longford Castle, a palatial house overlooking the River Avon in Wiltshire:

  It must be remembered that old houses were once new houses and purpose-built for their times, so there are pastry-larders, game-larders, sculleries, lamp-rooms, brush-rooms, china-closets etc., all once necessary but now empty and useless, as useless as the kitchenmaids’ bedrooms and the housemaids’ sitting room, where old furnishings linger on, growing damp, dirty and decayed … [In earlier days] not only were there cooks and butlers, but strange grades that we have lost, like stillroom maids, laundry maids, lamp-men.

  Longford Castle survived the war, occupied by British and American troops, and remained in the family; but the Countess also lamented the decline of the garden – not just at her own home, but at all the big houses whose staff were drastically thinned out by the war.

  Jim Lees-Milne saw the problems at first hand when he travelled about wartime Britain visiting houses that seemed most worthy of preservation. The biggest by far was Knole, home of the Sackville family at Sevenoaks in Kent. Founded in the fifteenth century, with 365 rooms, fifty-two staircases and seven courtyards, the house was so vast that it looked like a whole village. The fourth Lord Sackville had approached the Trust in 1935 to discuss Knole’s future, but claimed that he had difficulty in finding enough money to endow the place with the funds necessary for its maintenance, and, as at Stourhead, negotiations dragged on for years.

  In February 1944 minds were concentrated when a bomb fell in the park close to the house’s west front, spinning the stone heraldic beasts on the gable finials round on their plinths and blowing much glass out of the windows. Later that year, summoned to discuss numerous problems, Lees-Milne found his Lordship ‘as exquisitely dressed as ever, in a blue tweed suit and canary-coloured waistcoat which, when his delicate build and abrupt movements were taken into account, brought to mind that domesticated bird’. Nearly two more years went by before in July 1946 Mr Justice Vaisey at last made an order vesting Knole in the Trust, subject to a lease in favour of Lord Sackville.

  A still more captious customer was Colonel Sir Henry William Cameron-Ramsay Fairfax-Lucy, owner of Charlecote Park, where William Shakespeare stole deer in the sixteenth century – a crime for which he was arraigned by the first Sir Thomas Lucy in the Great Hall of the house. Charlecote, on the banks of the Avon, had been the home of the Lucy family for 700 years, but now Sir Henry wanted to hand it to the Trust. Although a qualified barrister, he seemed to Lees-Milne to have developed ‘a tortuous mentality which revelled in ambiguities, misinterpretations and confusions … He was pernickety, fussy, consequential, very pleased with himself and displeased with everyone else. He strutted like a bantam cock. He spoke with a peevish lisp.’ Much as Lees-Milne disliked him, and gravely though he was exasperated by his ‘preposterous self-importance’, other members of the Trust found him still more difficult. ‘He thinks he knows everything,’ wrote Donald Matheson, the Trust’s secretary, ‘and is extremely difficult, tiresome and stupid.’

  Blocked by his endless prevarication and changes of direction, negotiations (which had begun in 1937) meandered on for years, until just before Christmas in 1943 Lady Lucy died. On 5 August 1944 the Colonel suddenly married again, and two weeks later as suddenly expired. ‘It is dreadful to say so,’ Lees-Milne wrote, ‘but nobody seemed to regret his demise very much.’

  His sons brought up further problems; then abruptly in April 1945 they offered the house and certain chattels to the Trust as a gift, subject to an agreement that they might live in the Victorian wing. So ended one of Lees-Milne’s most drawn-out battles.

  No such aggravation awaited him at Gunby Hall, a relatively small but perfectly proportioned house of plum-red brick, built in 1700 on the edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds, surrounded by a 100-acre park full of magnificent trees. One day in 1941 Field Marshal Sir Archibald Armar Montgomery-Massingberd, husband of the owner, was walking in the garden when he met three men measuring the height of the trees with a theodolite. Without having consulted him, the Air Ministry was planning to build an airfield on land adjoining the estate – a scheme which would have entailed the felling of 800 trees and demolition of the house. Appalled by the prospect, the owners offered to hand the property to the National Trust, if that would avert disaster.

  When Lees-Milne went to see them in November 1943, he instantly fell for the place and its inhabitants.
The Field Marshal, whom he described as ‘tall, very handsome, with a clear complexion and bright blue eyes’, was then seventy-four, and he presided at dinner in a ‘snow-white pleated shirt-front bulging from a black velvet coat, immaculate, impeccable’. Even in wartime a guest was expected to wear a dinner jacket. Wharton, the butler, was ‘a sort of Lincolnshire Jeeves’, as much a gentleman’s gentleman as a butler, wearing black tail coat, starched collar and white tie. There was no wine at dinner, but the food was good and adequate, and beyond the green baize door, besides Wharton, were his wife (the cook), a pantry boy, two housemaids and a chauffeur. The Montgomery-Massingberds, Lees-Milne concluded, were still managing to lead ‘a feudal life on a modest scale’.

  Vigorous protests from the Trust brought the RAF officers to their senses: they modified their scheme so that the house could remain intact, and only a few trees would have to be topped. The Montgomery-Massingberds were so delighted that they decided to make the property over to the Trust there and then. Even so, a high, lattice-work tower topped by a revolving beacon went up in the middle of their tennis court, and for the rest of the war bombers roared overhead a few feet above the roof of the house. But, as Lees-Milne remarked, ‘the transfer of a large estate to the Trust never happened more smoothly’; and, with tower and Nissen huts speedily cleared away, Gunby Hall opened to the public on May Day 1946.

  By no means Lees-Milne’s smallest success was to organize the takeover of Blickling Hall, in Norfolk, left to the Trust in his will by Lord Lothian. This prime mover of the Trust’s shift towards country-house ownership had been appointed British Ambassador to Washington in 1939; but after eighteen months in office he died en poste from food poisoning aged only fifty-eight – a Christian Scientist who refused medical treatment.

  It took lawyers many months to sort out the provisions of his will; and when Lees-Milne first went to Blickling in May 1942 he found the place in a sorry state. The park had been divided up by fences, and was growing corn and cabbages. The RAF had occupied the house and grounds. A sea of Nissen huts obscured the orangery; a brick NAAFI complex had been built opposite the front door.

  The resident guardian was Lord Lothian’s former secretary, Muriel O’Sullivan, and Lees-Milne reckoned that the lusty young pilots were more terrified of Miss O’Sullivan, whom they called ‘the dragon’, than they were of night flights over Germany. Miss O’Sullivan was a remarkable character. Although poor and delicate, she regarded Blickling as a sacred trust and ‘cherished its every content, tradition and even superstition’. She also believed in the existence of a ghostly black dog which she claimed to have seen scampering down the long gallery and disappearing through the floorboards to an exit in the south-east turret. Yet there was nothing fey about her when she waded into the Wing Commander’s office, ‘abusing his subordinates as barbarians’.

  No matter how much she scolded the junior officers for vandalizing the house, they smashed the old crown glass of the windows and broke open doors leading to the state rooms, in which the furniture was under dust sheets. When the war ended and the airmen left, there was an immense amount of restoration to be done.

  Aristocrats and eccentrics were not the only people obliged to lower their standards. Even landowners not burdened with a white elephant found that the war was changing things. Some in the north of England had begun letting their vegetable ground to market gardeners, who, in return for loads of manure, would fettle up greenhouses in need of repair. Social life had diminished greatly. ‘Dinner parties at castle, hall and manor have been few and far between during the winter of 1941–42,’ observed The Estate Magazine, issued by the Country Gentlemen’s Association. Never had there been ‘so little intercourse among the gentry’, for they, like everyone else, were grounded by lack of petrol and the blackout.

  As with servants, the magazine lamented, the breed of faithful old workmen was dying out:

  Although there was a lingering soupçon of feudalism in their service and homage, many of them were an integral part of the family … always abounding in that courtesy and respect which was a marked characteristic. Time was when a stranger could easily spot the squire, his gamekeeper, his coachman and his groom, the well-to-do hunting farmer, the farm hand and so on, for each wore distinctive dress. Now it is otherwise, and strangely enough country folk seem to wish to ape the ‘towney’ and to sacrifice their distinctive birthright to a peas-in-a-pod likeness.

  Middle-class families also had to cut back. When Jean Cobb returned to her family home in the Ranmoor area of Sheffield in March 1944, after four years working for the Red Cross in Lisbon, distributing parcels to prisoners of war, she was dismayed to find how the establishment had shrunk. Her father Frank had founded a successful business making fine silverware, and the family lived comfortably in a six-bedroom house. Now their cook had retired and all the young maids had gone off to work in factories. Frank’s Bentley stood forlornly in the garage, immobilized by lack of petrol. The only retainer who remained was Renton, the ancient gardener. Jean’s own discomfort was increased by the fact that she was totally undomesticated, and could scarcely boil an egg.

  One stately home that escaped requisition was Badminton, domain of the Dukes of Beaufort, in Gloucestershire – a huge edifice, with a gloriously broad Palladian front and a roof line dominated by twin, domed pavilions. There was no question of the place being expropriated, because at the start of the war it was chosen as a refuge for Queen Mary the Queen Mother.

  An exacting customer, the old lady, then seventy-two, would rather have sat the war out at Marlborough House, her home in London: according to her biographer James Pope-Hennessy, she thought leaving town ‘not at all the thing’. When war broke out she was at Sandringham; but because the King was afraid that if she remained in Norfolk, so close to the east coast, she might be bombed or even kidnapped by German raiders, she moved to Gloucestershire to stay with her niece, Mary, Duchess of Beaufort. Queen Mary did not travel lightly. On 4 September 1939 it took a convoy of cars and vans eight hours to transport her entourage of sixty-three staff and their luggage from east to west. No wonder the Duchess viewed her arrival with apprehension.

  Not only did the royal visitor and her followers occupy large parts of the house: they also had to be victualled. The kitchen stock which they took over on 4 September 1939 sounds thoroughly unappetizing: six tins of Savoury Crisplets, six bottles of Lea & Perrins sauce, two Pommes Feculi and 100 dozen preserved eggs – but this was nothing compared with the amount of produce from the Home Farm which they proceeded to get through: 62 lb of butter, 114 pints of cream and fourteen cream cheeses in one month alone. They were also supplied with rabbits (forty-six at 1s 6d per couple in November), pheasants, hares, one partridge, and 36 lb of venison from one of the park herd’s fallow fawns, at 7d per pound.

  The Queen Mother was a formidable guest: once she had made up her mind about something, she never changed it, and never once in her life had she been known to be late for an appointment. At Badminton she unbent enough to pamper one of the dogs, to which she would administer a biscuit in a little ritual at the end of dinner. One night she delegated the duty to a visiting bishop; but he, being rather deaf, misconstrued her instructions and ate the offering himself – to the delight of the family.

  Queen Mary was by no means au fait with country life: when, early in her stay, her niece pointed out a field of exceptionally good hay, she replied, ‘So that’s what hay looks like.’ Nevertheless, she soon found an outlet for her energy in the form of attacks on ivy, towards which her enmity ‘had long been proverbial at Sandringham’. Quite rightly, she believed that ivy destroyed stone walls, brickwork and trees, and at Badminton she had endless scope for assaults. Having drafted members of her staff into her Ivy Squad, she progressed to forming her four bodyguard dispatch riders into a Wooding Squad, which thinned plantations under her direction.

  At her disposal she had a green Daimler, but to save petrol she usually went out to distant sites on a horse-drawn cart, she and
her lady-in-waiting sitting in two basket chairs on its flat platform. ‘Aunt May,’ said her niece. ‘You look as though you were in a tumbril!’ To which she replied, ‘Well, it may come to that yet – one never knows.’ Another of her passions was searching the countryside for salvage: she scoured the hedges for scrap metal, bottles and even old bones, and occasionally, as her biographer remarked, ‘her enthusiasm for salvaging scrap iron, combined with her ignorance of country habits’, carried her away:

  Several times the green Daimler would return loaded with field harrows and other implements … which Queen Mary espying had concluded to be discards ready for the scrap dump. In these cases the objects were quietly returned to their owners without the Queen’s knowledge.

  When she arrived in Gloucestershire, invasion scares were at their height. The villages of Badminton and Little Badminton, with about 100 houses and 400 inhabitants between them, lie in gently undulating land north-east of Bristol; and as there were several airfields in the neighbourhood, a Civil Defence pamphlet voiced fears that Germans might land there in preparation for an assault on the city:

  Germany might seek to secure as much of the Cotswold escarpment as possible, as part of a plan to capture the Bristol Channel ports … Badminton may be regarded as one of the key villages (a) for dealing with an enemy airborne attack, (b) for resisting the enemy’s land advance.

  The local Home Guard was strengthened by a detachment of the Royal Berkshire Regiment, whose task was to ‘form an outer ring of defence, of which Badminton House forms the approximate centre’. Troops would be used ‘to wipe out isolated enemy airborne landings within a limited distance’, but the Home Guard remained responsible for ringing the church bells in the event of invasion.