In the spring of 1936, James (‘Jim’) Lees-Milne, a young man of 28, eagerly approached the offices of the National Trust opposite the shunting yard at Victoria Station. Curly-haired, well-born and per sonable, he was about to take up his dream job. He wrote to a friend:
‘The National Trust is starting a scheme for preserving country houses, trying to induce landowners and proprietors to join. It would necessitate going all over England. I think if I searched the whole world there is no job I would rather have.’
Up to the 1930s, saving land, not country houses, had been the Trust’s priority. But fifty years of agricultural depression meant even the greatest estates were struggling. The Trust had the means to help. Its predecessors, the Commons Preservation Society and the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings, were simply campaigning charities. But the Trust, founded in 1895, was a holding body, able to acquire and preserve land and buildings for the nation. By 1935 its holdings had increased to nearly 50,000 acres.
No wonder Jim had a spring in his step. He had been a dim and unremarkable boy (his words) at Eton, to the extent that his father thought a university education would be wasted and instead signed him up for six unhappy months as the sole male at Miss Blakeney’s Stenography School for Young Ladies in Chelsea. Only a film by Merchant-Ivory could do full justice to this 1927 visual gem: Jim, a pretty young man in a boater, clacking typewriter keys about a quick brown fox and a lazy dog alongside girls in cloche hats. Like them, he was living in penury, in rented rooms. But unlike them, he was spending glamorous weekends at the Mitfords’ house, Swinbrook, in Gloucestershire. An equal opportunities lover, Jim, after an intense Eton romance with Tom Mitford, was now pointles
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Subscribe now or Sign inIn the spring of 1936, James (‘Jim’) Lees-Milne, a young man of 28, eagerly approached the offices of the National Trust opposite the shunting yard at Victoria Station. Curly-haired, well-born and per sonable, he was about to take up his dream job. He wrote to a friend:
‘The National Trust is starting a scheme for preserving country houses, trying to induce landowners and proprietors to join. It would necessitate going all over England. I think if I searched the whole world there is no job I would rather have.’
Up to the 1930s, saving land, not country houses, had been the Trust’s priority. But fifty years of agricultural depression meant even the greatest estates were struggling. The Trust had the means to help. Its predecessors, the Commons Preservation Society and the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings, were simply campaigning charities. But the Trust, founded in 1895, was a holding body, able to acquire and preserve land and buildings for the nation. By 1935 its holdings had increased to nearly 50,000 acres. No wonder Jim had a spring in his step. He had been a dim and unremarkable boy (his words) at Eton, to the extent that his father thought a university education would be wasted and instead signed him up for six unhappy months as the sole male at Miss Blakeney’s Stenography School for Young Ladies in Chelsea. Only a film by Merchant-Ivory could do full justice to this 1927 visual gem: Jim, a pretty young man in a boater, clacking typewriter keys about a quick brown fox and a lazy dog alongside girls in cloche hats. Like them, he was living in penury, in rented rooms. But unlike them, he was spending glamorous weekends at the Mitfords’ house, Swinbrook, in Gloucestershire. An equal opportunities lover, Jim, after an intense Eton romance with Tom Mitford, was now pointlessly smitten by Diana, Tom’s beautiful younger sister. The course completed, Jim’s mother stepped in and inveigled her son into Oxford. He emerged with a Third, but his connections were first-class. And the typing proved invaluable. There were many well- connected, susceptible older men who required secretarial help. Harold Nicolson was one such. His great gift to Jim was to show him that a daily diary, written with care, could lead to publication. Jim wanted to write but had no idea about what. More immediately, an undirected young man became a committed campaigner to save a small part of a vanishing world of ‘big houses and their landscapes’. There are echoes of Evelyn Waugh’s great novel Brideshead Revisited (1945) in this period of Jim’s life. Charles Ryder, the book’s laconic narrator, lover of Sebastian Flyte and later of his sister Julia, is an architectural artist. In the late 1920s his career is kickstarted when he is asked to paint the Flytes’ London residence, about to be demolished to make way for flats. This leads to commissions from other owners in similar straits (a staggering 128 country houses were pulled down after the First World War). Charles is able to collate his work in the bestselling Ryder’s Country Houses and his success is assured. The National Trust was able to offer owners a chance to survive by suggesting they donate their houses to the nation. Though the idea was not always greeted with joy, 225 owners initially expressed an interest. In the event, only 42 finally agreed to be interviewed by a Trust representative. Cometh the interview, cometh Jim on a bicycle. The Trust couldn’t afford a car. The bicycle went in the guard’s van as Jim ‘entrained’ the length and breadth of England to meet great men in great houses, with varying degrees of success. At Longleat, in Wiltshire, he had a fruitless interview with the owner Lord Bath, a patrician old gentle man in a frock coat, who then courteously escorted him to the front door. As was the custom of the house for departing guests, the steps to the drive were flanked on either side by quietly derisive footmen. As Jim reached the final step, another footman appeared, wheeling his bike. The entire party then stood and watched Jim cycle the length of the very long drive until he mercifully reached the shelter of trees. Though this visit was not a success, he had at least got inside the house. When he visited Charlecote in Warwickshire, the choleric Sir Henry Fairfax-Lucy, husband of the actual owner, showed him the grounds but flatly refused to even open the front door. ‘There’s absolutely no need for you to see it inside,’ Jim was brusquely informed. ‘Charlecote is known to be one of the greatest houses in England. Good morning.’ The Trust’s task must have seemed monumental. It was not enough to persuade an owner to donate their house: the land and contents had to be sold as well to provide for its upkeep. Think of the maintenance involved at Knole in Kent with its seven acres of roofs. Due to Jim’s energy, progress was made. By 1939, half a dozen splendid properties had been promised, with half a dozen others looking hopeful. Then, with the outbreak of war, country-house life was abruptly over. Stately homes were requisitioned. Servicemen were the most feared tenants: one’s best hope was a girls’ school or, ideally, nuns. Jim was called up but a year later was so badly injured in a London bombing raid that he was discharged from the army. It was galling, in 1941, not to be in uniform in a world on a war footing. But the Trust, now evacuated to West Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, received him back with open arms. The trickle of owners wanting to donate their houses had swollen to a torrent. He couldn’t fight but he could help to preserve his country’s heritage. A few months later, in January 1942, he began to write a diary, the first volume of which was published in 1975 as Ancestral Voices: Diaries, 1942–1943. Most diaries are mere aides-memoires of quotidian tedium, but from the beginning Jim was aware that he was living in ‘interesting’ times. By nature, an observer rather than a participator, he felt that what he saw and recorded in the grandest houses in England could be of interest to a wider, later, audience. He was correct in his surmise. But what is surprising – and delightful – is how much of himself he was prepared to commit to paper. His love life alone demands a separate index. A diary was the ideal outlet for a person of his volatile and slightly melancholic temperament, someone who was, by his own admission, on top of the world on Monday yet on Tuesday feared he would never be happy again. Unexpectedly, his Wednesday was a day of quiet content which was inexorably followed by a Thursday of seething fury about a perceived snub. And all this before the weekend had even started. He described himself as a member of the minor aristocracy. But his family had made their money in Lancashire cotton mills and only moved into their Tudor mansion, Wickhambrook in Worcestershire, two years before his birth. Thus he was acutely aware of where he stood on the social scale. Better by far to describe yourself as from the lower ranks of the aristocracy than at the top of the dreaded middle classes. Though his manners were excellent, and he had been brought up to treat all with equal courtesy, at heart he preferred a conversation with a dull upper-class person to that with an intelligent member of the lower classes, and he was prepared to say so. It is not an attitude likely to commend him to younger generations, but he was a man of his time. Some of my friends are troubled by my devotion to Jim’s diaries. What is the appeal, they demand with some truculence, in reading about a vanished social world, peopled with entitled snobs who demand copious footnotes to remotely make sense of their lives and connections? For me, the appeal is twofold. I am astounded and amused by the honesty with which Jim reveals his own character. Habitually in a gloom about his own worth and eternally envying this man’s art and that man’s scope, there is no one he subjects to more stringent criticism than himself. Then, too, if you can suspend your prejudices, you will find glorious writing and acutely observed portraits of people trying to cope in impossible times. What underpins the diaries is his awareness of the immense social change taking place in England during those years. There is almost an audible groan of gears as this country finally moves from the settled nineteenth century to the uncertain and uneasy twentieth. Jim himself was a keen appreciator of what he refers to as the Squirearchy – the settled order of privileged families who owned the countryside and had governed England for centuries. Now houses formerly requiring thirty indoor servants were being serviced by a two-hour daily visit from a woman from the village. He is deeply sympathetic to the owners’ plight, but he also enjoys their eccentricities. Lord Berwick of Attingham, he discovers, believes ghosts have invaded his vacuum cleaner. Lady Sybil Grant has actually left her home, Pitchford House, which she thinks is haunted, and is currently living in a tree house. A charming and informed young man, Jim is effective in securing almost every house he visits. Yet his very success, as he reveals in the second volume of diaries, Prophesying Peace: 1944–1945, causes him to examine his conscience. ‘The lengths to which I have gone, the depths I have plumbed to acquire properties for the National Trust will not all be known by that august and ungrateful body,’ he comments ruefully to himself. ‘It might be shocked by the zeal of its servant if it did.’ In a typical Jim aside, he adds that these pious reflections came to him in the bath that morning. In his defence, he consoles himself with the knowledge that he makes a point of being appreciative of every house he visits, even the duds, though inwardly groaning at what’s been done to the pilasters. One of the greatest strengths of his wartime diaries is the vivid picture he paints of London during those years. He describes going to a Trust meeting in Bloomsbury and discovering his familiar walk has been transformed into a nightmare landscape of flattened, silent squares, blanketed by heavy snow. He makes us feel, in the City, the absolute carnage that has been inflicted on ancient buildings and medieval churches, and he records his despair that Holland House, a great house where Jim had danced before the war, is now a shell. Ruins like these would present the Trust with a particular set of post war problems. What was worth restoring? And what were the ethics of producing a twentieth-century copy of an original church or listed building? Those expecting conventional wartime diaries will be sadly disappointed. There is not a single mention of his ration book, and only two of coupons. The sole domestic detail is when his windows are blown out by a V2 rocket. It entails a lot of sweeping up of broken glass with the help of his kindly housekeeper. (There is always a kindly housekeeper.) He eats out relentlessly and usually quite well though he claims everybody is hungry all the time. He brilliantly conveys day-to-day living in a world of continual anxiety. Even the joyful coming of spring is overlaid with the knowledge that it will mean the return of enemy bombers during the day. Peace brings relief and privation in equal measure. In his diaries for 1946–7, Caves of Ice, and Midway on the Waves (1948–9), there is still rationing, and it is always cold. But there’s also a gratifying sense of his wartime work coming to fruition. Great houses like Montacute have been donated and have now to be prepared for their public opening. Jim is still working flat out while, as usual, wrestling with matters of the heart. He has reached the age of 40 and his architectural publications have given him some recognition. But he still requires a more settled, better-funded existence and what in modern parlance is known as a ‘breakthrough’ book. And he is to be fortunate in both. The next decades will bring marriage to a titled, wealthy wife and the publication of a bestselling memoir, Another Self. Max Hastings, writing in 2009, described James Lees-Milne, correctly, as the ‘man who saved England’. Only a man of the strongest aesthetic convictions and unbridled energy, he says, could have achieved what he did. Jim was offered, and declined, a CBE in 1993. He thought he should have been given a knighthood. He was right. He had fully earned it.Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 91 © Frances Donnelly 2026
About the contributor
Frances Donnelly has moved from Suffolk after thirty-five years and has started a new life and a happy eighth decade in south London.
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