From National Trust . . .

In the mid-1930s, when James (Jim) Lees-Milne had come down from Oxford and had dabbled ineffectually in a couple of dim jobs, his life must have seemed bound for effete pointlessness. As it happened, however, history was about to provide the one job suited only to him, and luck (together with a little nepotism, which he always afterwards preferred to merit) was about to ensure that he got it.

No one knew at that time how many country houses there were scattered about England. In fact, except for those living in them, no one knew much about them at all, even the ones now crowded with visitors. It was certain though that there were many which were much too fine to be allowed to crumble away, and the prescient could see that rising costs and taxes would soon make it hard for owners to preserve them by themselves. The infant National Trust had till then been concerned mostly with landscape and coastline but it now came up with a scheme for these houses. If they could be endowed, and then taken over and maintained by the Trust, which would not be subject to tax, their former owners could continue to live in them and the public could be allowed to come and look round. On the whole, the owners were not prescient and were cordially repelled by this idea. The Trust was not even offering to buy their houses; it was asking to be given them together with a great deal of money. It seemed a kind of Jacobinism. Opening up their houses to possibly lower-class visitors did not appeal either. Only when war and austerity came, landed income dropped, and respectful servants disappeared, did the idea start to look attractive after all. Throughout this period, from 1936 to 1953, Jim was the National Trust’s first Country Houses Secretary; he acted as ambassador and aesthetic assessor. Some potential donors were survivors from the Victorian age and they must have been surprised to see a very young man arriving, as he often did, on foot, to relieve them of their patrimony. Supposing these first visits led onwards to negotiations, Jim would usually be faced by a fairly uninviting task. He might have to deal with legal thickets, intricate family quarrels, dilemmas of artistic judgement or owners who had grown very eccentric indeed behind their estate walls. He might have to cope with all of those at once. No one though could have been better suited to the role: acute, charming, tactful, unmistakeably blue-blooded but not competitively grand, and with a ‘deep atavistic compassion for ancient architecture so transient and vulnerable’, he entirely empathized with the owners, and for the most part they took to him as one of their own. Things could go amiss, however, if he forgot to pack a white tie for dinner. It is surprising to think that scenes like the following took place almost within the age of the atom bomb.

Old Lord Bath . . . received me at Longleat in a frock coat. He had presumably just come down from London. At the conclusion of – I regret to say – a fruitless interview he rang the bell and ordered my motor-car to be brought round. He insisted on accompanying me to the front door. The steps to the drive were flanked on either side with a row of footmen in livery. In place of my uniformed chauffeur an extra footman wheeled my bicycle to the front of the steps . . . At the end of a straight stretch of drive, having turned smartly to the right, I looked back for a last view of the glorious façade. Lord Bath, attended by his posse of open-mouthed and doubtless disdainful servitors, was in the old-world manner of true hospitality still standing at the top of the steps until his guest was out of sight. I gave a halfhearted wave, and pedalled ahead.

How well Jim succeeded in his work for the Trust is obvious today. Yet it is probably not for that work that he will be remembered, but for the way he recorded it in his diary, together with other aspects of his life and the disappearing world in which such a life was possible. He became one of the very best and most entertaining diarists ever to write in English. One of the particular pleasures of my long stint working at the publisher John Murray was my contact with Jim. It was a pleasure that recurred fairly frequently: we reissued the four wartime diaries and also his near-fictional memoir Another Self. We also published eight more volumes of diaries plus – though Jim claimed to be beyond any new writing (gaga in fact) – another two characteristic and very amusing (though this time factual) memoirs, People and Places and Fourteen Friends. The first of his books under the Murray imprint however was The Bachelor Duke, published in 1991. It was at the launch party for the Duke that I first met him. I hadn’t read him yet and was expecting to meet someone aggressively patrician and intellectual. In fact I took to him at once: his perspicacity made him sympathetic rather than formidable, and at gatherings such as launch parties he was diffident and vulnerable. When I first saw him in what had turned into a receiving line he seemed behind his affable exterior almost rigid with dismay. I was glad to read later in Ceaseless Turmoil, the penultimate volume of his diaries, that apprehension faded into relief and finally even enjoyment. Of course, after the party I was curious to read the diaries, and quickly became addicted to them. I would wait for new manuscripts much as nineteenth-century readers must have waited for new instalments of Vanity Fair. He had a devoted following, and happily a coterie of reviewers who adored him. There were even reviewers whose views of life were completely antipathetic to Jim’s but who nevertheless were seduced by his candour, and the marvellous brevity and timing of his prose, which not only threw a touching or mordantly amusing light on his own milieu but could illuminate human life itself. Every diarist strikes a characteristic balance between the events he is part of and his response to them. Most diarists’ strength lies in one or other, the record or the sensibility. Despite the cast, the events in Virginia Woolf ’s diaries do not seem to me terribly stimulating in themselves; one is likelier to be caught by her finely tuned interest in her own sensitivity. Likewise it would not, I think, have been fun to lead Malcolm Muggeridge’s life; it’s hard not to smile though when he exhorts himself yet again to escape from self and the flesh. On the other hand, in the case of Alan Clark (who would never have thought of escaping from either), it is his behaviour that turns the pages; he is a stranger to the inner life. Jim however is brilliant on both fronts. What happens in his life and what he thinks of it are wonderfully unexpected and idiosyncratic. Not everyone has dinner with Winston Churchill and watches him re-enact the Battle of Jutland with wine glasses and decanters, puffing cigar smoke to represent the guns; or gets into a spitting match at a bus stop; or snorts cocaine with Lord Berners (the Uncle Merlin of Love in a Cold Climate); or is told by Diana Mosley how Hitler loved England and wept when Singapore fell to the Japanese; or hears from John Betjeman of his first teenage affair, in a punt with the son of a vicar; or can describe as Jim could a vast range of riveting and also somehow illuminating encounters with friends as varied as the Mitfords, Cyril Connolly, Mick Jagger, Cecil Beaton, Anthony Powell, Bruce Chatwin and Ivy Compton-Burnett – as well as the livelier end of the aristocracy and the other luminaries, sympathetic or strange, brought to light by the National Trust. Jim’s responses are equally various and complex. He is always acute about human nature, including its unedifying aspects. He picks up immediately the self-congratulation in Bob Boothby’s description of the drawbacks of fame, spots Graham Sutherland’s fear of being too gracious to the undeserving, and confesses candidly to his own pang of disappointment when Bruce Chatwin, one of several friends to have developed Aids, makes a temporary recovery. He is prejudiced, but aware of his prejudices, which he never tries to make more attractive than they are. He is snobbish, but his is a romantic snobbery which loves the values of his vanishing class, rather as he loves its houses; he doesn’t suppose that a man is a better human being for being a duke. Jim never disguised his faults – he took for instance a certain pride in his almost protean inconsistency. Perhaps because he was so aware of his own failings, he was sympathetic to others’. His own sexual ambiguity (he claimed it was only when cancer had robbed him of any possibility of sexual activity that for some reason he became wholly heterosexual) seemed to sharpen his insight into the minds of both men and women. But whatever the reasons for his sympathy it certainly never robbed him of his entertaining malice. The louche and reckless Stephen Tennant, for instance, would not have enjoyed reading that he had the mannerisms of an Edwardian hostess, or Princess Margaret that she was bun-like, ungracious and brash. I used to feel sorry too for those who would find themselves dismissed as dull or porcine. Possibly it was the understanding that shone in Jim’s face that made people so forthcoming in his company. Sometimes they would regret it later, faced with the terrible permanence of print. In the office we would get nervous phone calls as the publication of each new volume approached. Callers were generally luckier if they asked for John Murray, who would sometimes give assurances which I, greedier for copy, would ungenerously wish he had not. In fact Jim would already have edited a great deal to save feelings, and after his death Michael Bloch did the same. When we reissued the first four diaries, I asked Jim whether, in pursuit of wholeness, we could not restore the text in the case of those now anaesthetized by death. But it turned out that his habit had not simply been to put lines through the most wounding passages but to retype an acceptable version of each diary. The original journals had gone the way of Byron’s. If the rewards for us in Jim’s diaries are obvious, what were they for him? In Caves of Ice he wrote that when he stopped keeping a diary he missed it like an old friend, though ‘an intimate friend who mustn’t know everything. If a man has no constant lover who shares his soul as well as his body he must have a diary – a poor substitute, but better than nothing.’ He continued to keep it after his marriage, though, so perhaps one should not be too certain of the truth on this point – just be grateful that he went on writing until almost the end of his life.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 8 © Grant McIntyre 2005