Palaces and Mansions
Your house is my house
Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli's Hughenden Manor in Buckinghamshire is owned by the National Trust. Prior to the Country Houses Scheme and enabling legislation in the 1940s, many similarly grand historic houses became hotels or apartment blocks - or simply disappeared. Under the National Trust, Hughenden will be maintained, and the house, garden and grounds are open to the public.
Scheming to get that house
You do not have to die before giving your posh pile to the National Trust.
In 2008, hotelier Richard Broyd and his company, Historic House Hotels, donated three stately homes to the Trust : the Grade I Hartwell House near Aylesbury, Bodysgallen Hall in North Wales and Middlethorpe Hall, in York. The hotels will carry on business as usual, but all profits will go to their upkeep.
The National Trust usually obtains its properties from wills written by owners unable to meet maintenance costs and inheritance tax - the dreaded "death duties" of old.
Too much of a good thing
You go for years without inheriting a single stately home and then four come along at once.
Philip Henry Kerr, 11th Marquess of Lothian (1882-1940), inherited Blickling, in Norfolk, and three other properties in 1930.
An extraordinary series of garden rooms is the main attraction at Hidcote, in the Cotswolds.
The multiple inheritance was potentially very costly. No, not dry rot or busted boilers. These houses were threatened by ruinous death duties amounting to £200,000. This was at a time when the estate's 30,000 acres netted less than £1,000 annually.
Lord Lothian had an idea that blossomed into the Country Houses Scheme, and as an MP, he guided it into law. He would give Blickling to the nation, and the nation would forgive the death duties. Lord Lothian would also provide an endowment.
The pattern was set, and especially in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War, the National Trust obtained several fabulous homes (such as Knole, the great Sackville-West pile) and gardens (such as Hidcote Manor, Major Lawrence Johnston's garden masterpiece in Gloucestershire).
Some old or stately mansions don't make it to the National Trust or English Heritage. One that got away recently was Sir Edward Heath's Arundells.
A prominent previous escapee was Chatsworth, which was pardoned as part of a deal that sent Hardwick Hall to the National Trust.
Photo: Chatsworth House Trust
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" . . . "
"We had at this time in Washington a singularly gifted and influential Ambassador. I had known Philip Kerr, who had now succeeded as Marquess of Lothian, from the old days of Lloyd George in 1919 and before, and we had differed much and often from Versailles to Munich and later. As the tension of events mounted not only did Lothiand evelop a broad comprehension of the scene, but his eyes penetrated deeply."
...
"It was at this moment, the most important in his public career, that Philip Lothian was taken from us. Shortly after his return to Washington he fell suddenly and gravely ill. He worked unremittingly to the end. On December 12, in the full tide of success, he died. This was a loss to the nation and to the Cause. He was mourned by wide circles of friends on both sides of the ocean. To me, who had been in such intimate contact with him a fortnight before, it was a personal shock. I paid my tribute to him in a House of Commons united in deep respect for his work and memory."
Winston Churchill, The Second World War, Volume II: Their Finest Hour (1949)
