James Lees-Milne

‘Jim’ Lees-Milne was born on 6 August 1908 at Wickhamford Manor, Worcestershire, and educated at Eton. His bucolic Papa then sent him to Miss Blakeney's Stenography School for Young Ladies in Chelsea to prepare for employment in the City and, it was hoped, instant independence. On completion of the course, aged twenty, and through the persistence of his mother, Lees-Milne went up to Magdalen College, Oxford. Bookish and shy, and a natural aesthete, he reacted against the loutish behaviour and the hedonistic values of the jeunesse d'oree of nineteen-twenties Oxford. Graduating in 1931, he worked as secretary to Lord Lloyd of Dolobran and then to Sir Roderick Jones, chairman of Reuters, while building up an expert knowledge of domestic architecture. Advised by Stanley Baldwin (a fellow Saturday-to-Monday guest) Lees-Milne pre-empted imminent dismissal by Jones in 1936 by resigning his post. Luckily, for he did not have any money, Vita Sackville-West recommended him for the post of secretary of the committee to promote the National Trust's new Country Houses Scheme, to which he was duly appointed at an annual salary of £400. The Trust then had a staff of four (he made five) and owned three houses, the management of which was Lees-Milne's responsibility, as was the acquisition of additional properties with adequate endowments. Although he was lucky to have been in the right place at the right time and to have known the right people, Lees-Milne was undoubtedly the right man, both personally and professionally, for the job of securing the preservation of the growing number of historic houses which the owners could no longer afford to maintain. Born into the squirearchy, tactful, sympathetic and persuasive he could meet hereditary owners on their own ground; a knowledgeable architectural historian with an eye for detail and an instinct for excellence, but no pedant (a doctrinaire approach would have antagonised the often hearty owners), he could assess the quality of their property with unerring accuracy and taste. His work was briefly interrupted by war service in the Irish Guards, from which he was invalided in 1941 and, back with the National Trust, he lived and worked first in its temporary headquarters at West Wycombe Park, the home of Sir John Dashwood, then in Cheyne Walk and finally in Queen Anne’s Gate. On borrowed bicycles, on foot, in unpunctual trains and buses and sometimes the very old National Trust Austin, Lees-Milne combed the country on behalf of the Trust seeking ancestral houses which could be retained as family seats, at no expense to the owners, but with some public access to the grounds and fine rooms. Petworth, Ham House, Nostell Priory, Felbrigg, Clivedon, Knole, Blickling, Montacute, Polesden Lacy and West Wycombe Park itself are some of the properties he saved from decay. Even where the houses he inspected were `not up to our standard', `undeniably hideous', `utility Georgian’ or `textbook Elizabethan’, or had been `faked about' and were therefore passed over, Lees-Milne's detailed notes are a valuable architectural and social record of a vanished landscape. The Country Houses Scheme, as it evolved during his period of office, reflected to a large extent Lees-Milne's own ideas of a patrician pre-1914 social order. The conversion of his beloved houses into museums, thronging with visitors eating cream teas and buying souvenirs in converted stable-blocks was not what he had set out to achieve though, inevitably, it was a development of his work and necessary for its continuation. Lees-Milne retired from full-time employment for the National Trust when he married in 1951, by which time it owned fifty-three properties, but he remained as an adviser on historic buildings until 1966. He had always communicated easily and elegantly, his first published volume being The National Trust (ed. 1945), and writing now occupied most of his time until he was over eighty. His publications include: Tudor Renaissance, 1951; The Age of Inigo Jones, 1953; Roman Mornings, 1956; Baroque in Italy 1959; Baroque in Spain and Portugal,1960; English Country Houses: Baroque 1685-1714, 1970; Images of Bath, 1982; The Last Stuarts, 1983; Some Cotswold Country Houses, 1987 and Venetian Evenings, 1988. Interspersed with these architectural works were biographies of William Beckford, the 6th Duke of Devonshire and his friends Harold Nicolson and the 2nd Viscount Esher, under whose committee chairmanship he had served; volumes of autobiography and his celebrated Diaries, written in the shorthand he learned at Miss Blakeney’s. The earlier volumes are written with perception about his friends and acquaintances, full of gossip and anecdotes about Eddy and Jamesey and Boguey, Emerald and Sybil and Nancy; but the final volume, 1973-4, reveals a lost urbanity, a shameless snobbery and a near-loathing of the contemporary world with all the meanness, in his eyes, of twentieth century art and the hideous vulgarity of the streets. Lees-Milne was an active member of the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings, a founder of the Georgian Group and a leading member of the Bath Preservation Group. He loved sight-seeing at home and abroad but his last years were spent alone in his exquisite seventeenth-century house on the Badminton estate, though he managed to commute daily to Bath to work in William Beckford's library in Lansdowne Crescent. He occasionally visited Burlington House and attended the William Morris centenary celebrations at Kelmscott in 1996. His death on 28 December 1997 was marked by a third leader in The Times headed `A National Treasure' – a rare distinction. As a memorial to him the National Trust plans to restore the eighteenth-century library at Gunby Hall in Lincolnshire, one of Lees-Milne's favourite `small gems' (where the strawberries were always rich and succulent) and to reinstate the bookshelves and books which have been stored away for many years. The project will be funded by the sale of Lees-Milne's own books which he gave to the Trust just months before his death.