James Lees-Milne: The Life by Michael Bloch
John Murray, £25
Late in life, as tenant of a house on the Badminton estate, James Lees-Milne, busy genius of the National Trust, heard the views of his landlord, “Master”, the super-philistine and intolerable Duke of Beaufort: “When engaging servants, Master asks them what their religion and politics are. If they vote Labour…they are not engaged. And if they admit to being Roman Catholic, that is worse.” As for Lees-Milne and his wife: “What is the point of them? They don’t hunt, they don’t shoot, they don’t fish.”
If you will mix with the aristocracy, the occasional “twelfth transmitter of a foolish face”, like that purple-featured huntsman, is to be expected. But Lees-Milne, Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford, swam in the upper stream all his life. Given its eccentricities, Michael Bloch, his biographer, has more of the small fruit of anecdote than even this superlative current bun can readily hold.
“Jim”, as he conveniently calls him, was a welcome house guest of the incomparably nicer Devonshires at stupendous Chatsworth. “More like St Peter’s, Rome”, he thought. He would rescue Gunby in Lincolnshire for the gentle Montgomery-Massingberds. When the wartime Air Ministry proposed knocking it down for an extra runway, he squared the PPS to the Air Minister, Sir Archibald Sinclair, who squared his boss who shifted the runway somewhere else. Gunby went to the National Trust, with the Massingberds resident and delighted.
He persuaded the Earl of Crawford, vacating Haigh Hall in West Lancashire, to make over much of its contents to resplendent but empty Montacute: “several Teniers, a Ruysdael, Ostades, van der Neer, a Pintoricchio, Reynolds of Lady Eglinton at the harp, Opie of Dr Johnson, a Romney of the young Pitt and so forth.” Crawford was not only a 24th Earl, but Trust chairman and his employer! But as Jim’s friend and early lover, Sir Harold Nicholson, remarked: “That is how he wheedles things out of old ladies.”
Lees-Milne is an example of someone lucky enough to be doing what he loves best in the world and does extraordinarily well. Leaving university with a poor degree, he found a direction in life by combining a gift for friendship with devotion to beautiful buildings. A secretarial course equipped him to become the sort of high-up’s gentleman secretary to be found throughout PG Wodehouse. It got him a job with Lord Lloyd whom Bloch nicely parcels in different gift-wrapping to Oswald Mosley: “Both believed in the superiority of the British race and the destiny of the British Empire.” Both were anti-semitic, both harboured dictatorial ambitions, but Mosley was a heterosexual conquistador and Lloyd a troubled High Church homosexual. Importantly, Mosley admired the Nazis, Lloyd thought them sinister.
Lees-Milne was not political, and only in a mildly civilised way when he tried. The politician with whom, 60 years on, he really empathised, was John Major. However he had secretarial discretion, he was meeting political people, and his own bisexuality brought him into the hard, bright, tinkling world of early Evelyn Waugh, an anonymous Paul Pennyfeather lightly or devoutly friends with Agatha Runcible, Basil Seal and, especially, Miles Malpractice.
The contemporary gay world, so earnestly political, so Tatchellised and, well, dowdy, would find James Pope Hennessy, beaten to death by rough trade in 1974, Tom Mitford, John Gielgud, Robert Byron and Jim’s later wife, Alvilde Chaplin, who was also the lesbian lover of Victoria Sackville-West, very hard to take. But that cultivated world, and its contacts, straight and gay, political and civil servantly, created the aesthete armed which he quietly became after secretarial skills and connections had got him into the then rather underpowered National Trust.
What matters about Lees-Milne, beyond the brilliant diaries and the spangled life, is that he is the English Prosper Mérimée. What that poet-bureaucrat did for the buildings of France, the galvaniser of the Trust, by shrewd dealing, deft publicity and a virtuoso touch on the wires, achieved for the great houses of England. He lived to turn down a CBE, despise the Queen Mother and leave the Catholic Church he had joined. Michael Bloch’s delicious, light touch, bowl you over account is priority reading for anyone with the least response to the splendours remaining.
Edward Pearce
