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. 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 don't have to die first 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 in wills written by owners unable to meet maintenance costs and inheritance tax - the dreaded "death duties" of old.
Too much of a good thing
An extraordinary series of garden rooms is the main attraction at Hidcote.
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. Forget dry rot. These houses were riddled with the prospect of 40% death duties.
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 great homes - and fabulous gardens such as
Hidcote, in Gloucestershire.
1. Knole - the great Sackville-West pile
2. Hidcote Manor - Major Lawrence Johnston's garden masterpiece
3. Other houses are regularly added to this site. Check back frequently.
" . . . "
No sooner had she returned to her home in Blackfriars than
she was made aware by a succession of Bow Street runners and other grave
emissaries from the Law Courts that she was a party to three major suits
which had been preferred against her during her absence, as well as
innumerable minor litigations, some arising out of, others depending on
them. The chief charges against her were (1) that she was dead, and
therefore could not hold any property whatsoever; (2) that she was a
woman, which amounts to much the same thing; (3) that she was an English
Duke who had married one Rosina Pepita, a dancer; and had had by her
three sons, which sons now declaring that their father was deceased,
claimed that all his property descended to them.
Virginia Woolf , Orlando (1928)
