DISTINCTION AND CLASS
John Martin Robinson celebrates James Lees-Milne, 80 this week
JAMES Lees-Milne, who is 80 on 6 Au- gust, played an important role in the National Trust Country House Scheme from its inception in 1936, and remains a prolific and elegant writer on a wide range of topics. His literary output includes biography and travel, various forms of personal memoir, some fiction and numer- ous architectural studies. Such a bald statement does little, however, to capture the impact of his character and outlook, or the originality of his work. For the most notable thing about him is an admirable independence of mind and a breathtaking disdain for fashionable nostrums. He is one of the few people to have expressed in print regret for not having gone to Spain to fight on Franco's side in the Civil War: a `life-and-death struggle with the forces of world disruption and anarchy'. His views on the second world war are equally forthright: 'The Midsummer day (1941) on which while lying in bed in hospital I listened to Churchill on the radio magnify- ing the virtues of our new ally Soviet Russia, marks without question the nadir of my whole life.' Perhaps equally discon- certing to liberal sensibilities is the remark that he loves class distinctions and hopes they last for ever; talk of egalitarianism he sees as hypocritical cant. He has spent his life in the services of civilised values and the defence of basic truths, striving to uphold what remains in England of the long tradition of European civilisation.
Born in 1908 into a family of landed gentry originally from Lancashire but sett- led in Worcestershire, Lees-Milne was educated at Eton and Oxford. That sounds conventional enough. But the full story of his upbringing is more complicated, even bizarre. In between school and university, for instance, he spent a year at Miss Blakeney's Stenography School for Young Ladies in Manresa Road, Chelsea, where he was the only man in a class of 20 girls and lived on a shilling a day. Knowledge of shorthand and the ability to type has been useful to him in his literary pursuits, but when his father dumped him there (paying a year's fees by cheque on the spot) it was in the hope that the course might prepare him for employment in the City so that he could 'stand on his own feet'. It was only through the determination of his mother, who arranged the whole thing while his father was shooting in Scotland, that he went up to Oxford in 1928.
Oxford, however, turned out to be a great disappointment; he claims that he learnt nothing there and made few new friends. It is refreshing after the extrava- gantly purple maunderings of most of those who were up at Oxford in the 1920s to read a forthright statement that the university then was 'a complete waste of time'. Despite his disappointment with Oxford he remained grateful to his mother for fight- ing for him to go there. Like many of his generation, when young, his relations with his father only just stopped short of parri- cide. He thought him hidebound and they disagreed on many fundamental principles. On the other hand he was close to his mother whom he found altogether more sympathetic. His part-autobiography, Another Self, is full of hilarious Mun- chausen escapades, including helping her to elope in a balloon from the top of Broadway Hill 'vaguely scattering sand and pound notes into the air' as she drifted skywards.
Eton, unlike Oxford, gave him much. His time there was idyllic, and provided him with a group of friends to whom he was 'more deeply attached than they ever suspected and to whose memory — since most of them are dead — I shall be eternally faithful. She had awakened in me, through them, a love of literature, the arts and above all civilised living.... the friends I made and the tastes they fostered at Eton were intellectual and aristocratic, whereas my circumstances were low-brow and lower upper-class.' It is perhaps worth pondering the fact, at a time when there is so much public debate about formal educa- tion, that most civilised people owe more to the influence of friends and private reading than to any official school curricu- lum. Jim's Eton friends included Basil Ava, Tom Mitford and Robert Byron. The latter in particular was responsible for awakening in him a love of architecture and literature.
His vision on the road to Damascus took place at Rousham while up at Oxford. Lees-Milne, together with a group of other undergraduates, was invited to a dinner party in that romantic house by the tenant, Maurice Hastings, 'a capricious alcoho- lic... rich, clever and slightly mad'. After dinner the drunken Hastings proceeded to attack the 18th-century Dormer family por- traits with a horsewhip and then to take pot shots at the classical statues in William Kent's landscape garden with a gun. He was egged on in his beastly endeavours by most of those present, including Maurice Bowra. Jim was appalled by the incident and vowed then and there to devote his energies and abilities to preserving country houses.
The chance to do so occurred in 1936 when the National Trust, which from its foundation in the 1890s up to that date had been concerned solely with protecting open landscape, launched a new scheme to save some of the historic houses of Eng- land and needed a secretary to run it. Vita Sackville-West recommended Lees-Milne for the job and he started work immediate- ly. Apart from a break at the beginning of the war, when he served in the Irish Guards before being invalided out in 1941 as a result of a bomb explosion in London which broke the base of his spine and initiated intermittent attacks of epilepsy, he served as secretary of the National Trust Country House Scheme till his marriage in 1951. Thereafter he remained for many years architectural adviser to the Trust, but moved to the country to concentrate more on writing. He and his wife, Alvilde Chaplin, bought and restored a fine Geor- gian house and created a beautiful garden at Alderley in Gloucestershire where they lived till the 1970s. Subsequently they acquired their present smaller house at Badminton. From there he commutes reg- ularly to write in William Beckford's lib- rary at Lansdowne Crescent, Bath.
The success of the National Trust Coun- try House Scheme owed much to him. It is unlikely that so many owners would have given their houses to the Trust if it had not been for his endeavours. His published wartime diaries record the exhilaration of rescuing houses in those inauspicious years. The original intention was to retain the houses where possible as family seats but with some public access on the model 'But it's true I tell you. I saw this woman priest with her head tucked under her arm.' of the French Demeures Historiques. He views with some reservations the more recent development of the National Trust: families mainly departed and the houses run as standardised museums with exces- sive numbers of visitors, obtrusive bric-A- brae shops and the creeping imprint of a `corporate image'. But many of the houses he saved would no longer exist at all if the Trust had not provided a necessary lifeline during hard times.
Two years before joining the National Trust Lees-Milne underwent another con- version — to Roman Catholicism. Or rather, as he would put it, a 'reversion to the Ancient Faith'. He became a Catholic for temperamental rather than dogmatic or theological reasons. He admired the papa- cy's unbroken descent of nearly 2,000 years, its heraldry, symbolism and pagean- try. He loved the Gothic sanctity, Renaiss- ance paganism and baroque opulence en- shrined in the Church's rituals and liturgy. He considered these 'the ultimate beauties worth dying for'. There was also a political dimension to his 'reversion'. He saw the Church as an 'impregnable bulwark against Communism in western Europe'. Ever since Oxford, where many of his contem- poraries flirted with Soviet Russia, he has had an implacable hatred for Communism, which he views as a threat both to the individual and to European civilisation as a whole. But the Catholic Church too has been a source of disillusion. He was so disgusted by the philistinism of Paul VI's destructive and supererogatory imple- mentation of the decrees of the Vatican Council — in order to placate 'the ephemeral tastes of the vulgar and ignor- ant' — that he returned to the Anglican fold.
On his 80th birthday it is to be hoped that he looks ahead with some grounds for renewed optimism. The present Pope, for instance, can certainly be described as 'an impregnable bulwark against Commun- ism'; he has moreover restored many of the `incidentals' of the Church, including doubling the size of the Sistine Choir and putting the canons of St Peter's back into their traditional garb. And while the National Trust itself may have become more of a museum-orientated exercise than originally envisaged, the great private houses — Badminton, Chatsworth, Com- pton Wynyates, Castle Howard, Sledmere, Arundel — survive and flourish. It must be some consolation, too, that his books are avidly read by a younger generation, espe- cially Another Self (1970), Roman Morn- ings (1956) and Earls of Creation (1962), all of which are now regarded as classics, the first editions being expensive collec- tor's items. Further productions from Beckford's Grecian library, with its Siena scagliola pilasters framing mahogany book- cases, are eagerly awaited by his many friends and admirers who have found his work a source of constant inspiration, solace and entertainment.
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