James Lees-Milne

James Lees-Milne, who saved the country house, died on December 28th 1997, aged 89

The old houses of England, James Lees-Milne once wrote, meant for him “far more than human lives”. In the 1930s, when Mr Lees-Milne began his mission of mercy to save what he could of “the England that mattered”, the old houses were falling like a property Passchendaele. The owners could no longer afford to run their vast estates, many of which had been designed for feudal economies. Some owners seemed themselves in a state of decay. Mr Lees-Milne recalled going to a party at a stately home where the owner entertained his guests by slashing at paintings with a whip and shooting the heads off statues in the garden. He was appalled. It brought home to him how he cared for “the continuity of history”. It was, he said, a turning point.

Mr Lees-Milne’s task was to persuade the owners of great homes deemed worthy of preservation to give them to the National Trust, a body that had been set up in 1895 by Victorians anxious about the spread of industrialisation. Up to 1936, when Mr Lees-Milne joined the trust, it had mainly acquired endangered land. Now it was after property as well.

It was difficult to persuade an owner of a property that had been in his family since Elizabethan times to hand it over, for nothing. Assurances that the nation would be grateful did not carry much weight with a lord of all he surveyed. Mr Lees-Milne’s main carrot in his negotiations was the promise that, when the owner died, his heirs would not have to pay the huge death duties that had crippled many families. The heirs could, in some cases, stay in residence in part of the property. A series of acts of Parliament made the scheme law.

This redistribution of property was seen by some as secret socialism, although not by the conservative-minded trust, and certainly not by Mr Lees-Milne. The trust is independent of government and is supported mainly by members’ fees and legacies. All the same, the 11.7m people who in 1996 happily tramped around the trust’s 263 houses, castles and other once-forbidden premises must have included a fair number of Mr Lees-Milne’s despised “lower classes”.

James Lees-Milne’s parents were Worcestershire “gentry”, which made them, in class terms, just below nobility. He paints a picture of a slightly dotty household, with a father deeply suspicious of young James’s interest in art. Calling anyone “artistic” denoted “decadence, disloyalty to the Crown and unnatural vice”, he noted in his memoirs. Mr Lees-Milne was notoriously disloyal in his gossipy memoirs. The stories he tells of the then famous are amusing in a schoolboyish sort of way. Of Ivy Compton-Burnett, he noted that the writer “ate half a pot of raspberry jam, and I was shocked to see her surreptitiously wipe her sticky fingers upon the cover of my sofa”. He favoured the exotic. He had stories of Robert Byron, another writer, swimming in the Bay of Naples while being fed with chocolates from a boat and of Rosamond Lehmann, yet another, at a seance, apparently talking with the dead.

Although he had a wide circle of acquaintances and admirers, Mr Lees-Milne regarded himself as an

outsider. He was not sure whether to be a Roman Catholic or an Anglican, and tried both creeds. Politically, he was as right as you could get: he supported the Franco cause in the Spanish civil war. As well as his memoirs, he wrote a lot about architecture, published three novels and wrote some poetry, which he showed to friends but was otherwise unpublished. Probably he would have liked to be remembered chiefly as a writer. But the fashionable enthusiasm for conservation has provided him with his pedestal: during 30 years with the National Trust, as an official and later an adviser; he did as much as anyone to save the country house. Others took up the cause, but Mr Lees-Milne, single-minded in this at least,pushed it forward.

He had his critics. A book on the trust by an American, Paula Weisdeger, criticised the amateurism of Mr Lees-Milne. Some critics agreed with her. But, as she put it, “several of the old boys took to spitting at me, in print. How dare I, an American, etc?” America’s National Trust for Historic Preservation tends to look forward as much as back, perhaps because there is not all that much back to look at. It has just waged a campaign against “sprawl development” in Vermont, an echo of the anxieties felt by the Victorian founders of the British trust. France’s Demeures Historiques, old houses where the family stays on but allows visitors (usually reluctantly) to look around, are closer to the British idea envisaged by Mr Lees-Milne.

The vision has become fuzzy, perhaps inevitably. James Lees-Milne regretted that some National Trust houses where the families had moved out now had the appearance of museums, with souvenir shops. Wandering around the rooms decorated and arranged with “suave good taste”, it was difficult to imagine that anyone had once actually lived there. Reaching for his most devastating barb, he said it was “just very faintly suburban”.