07 September 2017
Happy Birthday, Philip
by J.R. Thomas
Welcome back from your summer vacation. For most of us each year the choice lies between guaranteed sun, airport queues, and lobster like tanning – or rain, motorway jams, and that strange pallidness that tells the neighbours that this was the year of the staycation. But there are compensations for summer in England, and a leading one must be the joys of the English country house and garden. And cream teas, you might add. Frequently that means a National Trust country house, exquisitely restored, perfectly maintained, staffed by friendly volunteers of a certain age. Often with a secondhand bookshop, always with a gift shop full of items that, well, you might not want them yourself but which will make lovely presents, and a garden plants stall, and home grown fruit and vegetables, and an ergonomically designed playground for the younger children, and woodland walks for the older members of the party.
There are irritations to the National Trust country house style and indeed we will come back to them, but the fact is that the Trust does sell its country houses to the visiting public remarkably well. They have set the standard to which the private owners must aspire, what might be called the Waitrose approach to displaying the built heritage.
What few visitors probably realise, and the Trust, considering that it is for their country house portfolio that they are probably best known, have made remarkably little of, is that 2017 is the 80th anniversary of the 1937 National Trust Act. This was the ground-breaking legislation that led to the National Trust we know and love today, enabling the Trust to accept country houses, their gardens, estates, and contents as gifts, along with ring-fenced tax free endowment funds which could be used to maintain the house in perpetuity. Country house owners, even of the most ancient lineage, have not infrequently managed to get into a pickle where they could not afford, or in some cases simply did not want, their ancestral seats.
After the deaths of so many heirs to great estates in the First World War and the rising burden of taxation, something of a peak in the sale of great houses arose in the 1920’s and 1930’s as elderly owners with perhaps only remote legatees decided to give up, and sell. There was nothing to suggest that this was likely to become a permanent crisis, and indeed in the early 1930’s there was a resurgence in the country house way of living. Old fortunes revived and there was a large influx of new ones from rising industries (publishing and newspapers to name but two). The number of sales of “important” houses slowed and many were restored and modernised and lived in in the old fashioned way (if with considerably less staff).
So to create a mechanism by which houses and estates could pass to the Trust was remarkably far-sighted, and it was largely by the efforts of one man that it came to pass. That man was Philip Kerr, 11th Marquess of Lothian. He was a sociable and intelligent bachelor, who had somewhat unexpectedly inherited his title and vast estates in the Scottish borders and in Norfolk in 1930, disrupting his previous low key existence as a minor politician, latterly as private secretary to Lloyd George when Prime Minister. He was a man of liberal, even radical, leanings, and had been heavily involved in the post war peace conference negotiations, and then in making Liberal Party policy. His cousin dying young, Kerr succeeded to the great Lothian wealth which enabled him to establish a more independent political role, and to become a great political host, entertaining at one of his two Scottish seats, or at his romantic Jacobean pile, Blickling in Norfolk. He was a friend of the Astor family, a Christian Science convert, and a member of the Cliveden set – that group of very influential persons, drawn from all political parties, who wanted to avoid war with the rising Nazi Germany at almost any cost.
Lothian’s brother had been killed in the first weeks of the Great War and that event, plus his religion and natural character, made the Marquess profoundly opposed to war; he was certainly not a Nazi sympathiser as some of the Cliveden set were, although after two meetings with Hitler in the mid 1930’s, he praised the Fuhrer. After Germany’s reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936 he said it was “no more than the German’s reoccupying their back garden”. He was, it must be said, in the mainstream at that time in expressing such sentiments. He was opposed to imperialism and was an early contact of Pandit Nehru in making tentative moves to Indian independence. He was also not entirely comfortable with ownership of great wealth; and that, and his family’s strange recent history – almost every Marquess of Lothian for a century had died young, and many childless – led him to dwell upon how the benefits of the great estates – beauty, stability, artistic contents, an emphasis on long term preservation might be safeguarded but be available to all. His bright idea was to empower the National Trust, by then forty years old, to take the properties on, providing it could be done without financial threat to the long stability of the Trust. It was a cause where he was able to garner much political support quickly and in 1937 the Act was passed and the legislation introduced.
After the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 Lothian made a very open revocation of his previous stance on the Hitler regime, calling Hitler a gangster. In September 1939, on the outbreak of war, he became British Ambassador to the USA, building important contacts which eventually enabled the passing of the Lend Lease legislation, so important to bolstering British resources during the war. But this was something he did not see; he died suddenly aged only 58 in early 1940. In what was almost a Lothian tradition he had not married and his heir was a cousin aged 18.
Ironically as a result of Philip Kerr’s will, his great estate at Blickling in Norfolk was the first country house to pass to the Trust under the 1937 Act, with 5,000 acres of land. It included the Jacobean house, and almost its entire contents. The new Marquess inherited the Scottish estates – and a large tax bill.
The present day visitor to Blickling might be a bit taken aback by the Trust’s approach to its great benefactor. This summer has the theme “Why Are You Here?” presented as for Nehru’s weekend visit in July 1938 (he also brought his daughter Indira, later a controversial Prime Minister of India, though this is not mentioned), and makes much of Lothian’s somewhat tenuous connections to India in an attempt to link the house to the 70th anniversary of Indian independence. Also not mentioned, though perhaps understandably, is Lothian’s connections to appeasement, though his service in Washington is. And in the modern way of the Trust he is chummily called “Philip” at frequent intervals.At least Philip fares better than his near neighbour, Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer. Ketton-Cremer was a distinguished local historian, and owner of Felbrigg, a large distinguished house, wonderful contents, and much land. Inspired by his neighbour’s example and having no direct heir he left it all to the Trust in 1969.
This year the Trust has decided that the theme at Felbrigg should be Ketton-Cremer’s supposed closet homosexuality, though there is no evidence that he was gay- certainly both he and Lothian were what used to be called “confirmed bachelors” but that is in itself evidence of nothing except for an urge to keep private things private.
Such is the rather politically right-on and aggressively hip way of the Trust at the moment. But do not let this put you off an autumnal visit to either or both of these fine houses which are beautiful and well presented, with magnificent gardens. And if at Blickling, raise a cream scone to Philip Kerr, 11th Marquess, who made it all possible.
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