Under Charlie’s and Gertie’s guidance, Killerton saw no diminution of the lord-of-the-manor style. Farm tenants came to chapel every Sunday to hear their landlord read the lesson and shake hands with him after the service. If they did not turn up, a Killerton groom was sent the following morning with a summons to the house, where the farmer would be required to account for his absence. The interviews were held in Charlie’s study, always followed by a glass of whisky.
A young girl, invited to Killerton, found herself overwhelmed by the experience of this other kingdom:
I remember the excitement of arriving by train at Exeter, where a footman would be waiting for us on the platform looking very smart with a cockade at the side of his top-hat. There was a carriage and pair outside and we were driven out to Killerton with two large Dalmatians running beside the carriage. As we got near Killerton everyone recognized the carriage and the village men and boys all touched their hats, while the women and girls made little curtsies. The footman blew a whistle as the carriage approached the lodge at the bottom of the drive and an old lady, who lived there rent-free for this purpose, came out to open the gate.13
There was nothing unique about this. Estate after estate imposed these daily dramatics. As Walter Bagehot had written in 1867, the English were a ‘deferential community’ in which the ‘rude classes at the bottom … defer to what we may call the theatrical show of society’.14 Other Aclands noticed the steep social differences. As Anne, the wife of Charlie’s grandson, later wrote, a gamekeeper came to the house every morning to brush the dog, ‘but next to the keeper’s cottage where the pheasants were raised, there was a family of children so hungry that they came out early to eat the boiled rice and chopped hard boiled egg put out for the birds’.15
The world was changing. In 1906, fifty Labour members were returned in the Liberal landslide, the portent of the ending of Liberal England at the moment of its greatest triumph. Charlie had no children, but his younger brother Arthur had a son, Francis, who was therefore heir to the Acland fortunes. Inheritance by the nephew of a childless man has always been fraught. In this case ideological difference exacerbated the problem. Francis and his gifted wife, Eleanor Cropper, the daughter of a rich Lake District paper-making family, were well on the radical side of the braided Acland inheritance. She was a brilliant woman, had got a first in history at Somerville College, Oxford, in 1900, and was a strong feminist and pacifist, a writer and pamphleteer on the Labour end of Liberal. In 1906, Francis was elected Liberal MP for Richmond in Yorkshire, after a campaign in which both he and Eleanor covered the entire, hilly constituency on bicycles, only hiring a car on polling day. ‘Where his bicycle won’t carry him, he carries his bicycle’,16 his supporters said.
Francis and Eleanor inevitably looked on their future inheritance in the West Country with some trepidation. As she wrote to her sister in 1911, when staying at Killerton, she was
wondering more and more how we shall tackle the job when it is ours. It’s all so alien to us, & I don’t see how one can be a good land-lord when one’s heart & head are not in the system. We shall probably be horrid betwixt & between, offending our neighbours and puzzling our dependents.
However I think Dick [her eldest son, Richard, then five] shapes for a good old Tory so perhaps he will restore the name of Acland to its ancient prestige. I very much wish he could spend his childhood here & really get soaked in the place as we were in Westmoreland. I keep thinking of Father’s happy Christian name sort of terms with ‘John’ & James & Anthony. But I don’t know if that is possible on an enormous estate – I fancy the land-lord would always be more hedged about with state. Luckily we have three sons & we need not leave all to one.
Dick and Arthur [then three] are enjoying themselves here. It is jolly to be able to turn them loose in a big garden. They play at being polar bears and lambs alternately. You have to be careful if you go too near them when they are polar bears – you generally know which it is by the various noises.17
For all that room and space, and the growling games at Killerton, Eleanor was ‘not happy at heart about it all’. Francis did not care for the self-importance of the landowning life. His father, Arthur, had refused a peerage, as his father and grandfather, the two Sir Thomases, had both done. He remained in London until his death in 1926. Francis inherited the Acland estates on his uncle’s death in 1919, but remained a peripatetic Liberal MP in various constituencies. His career was not a happy one, coinciding with the decline of Liberalism from a great governing movement to a party which split and which, especially in the south-west, was becoming a regional, anti-metropolitan protest group.18 This was scarcely Aclandish. Large-scale, national, principled government had been their stock-in-trade for generations. After a zigzag career, partly as a minister in Asquith’s government, Francis ended up in the 1930s as the Liberal MP for North Cornwall, which he remained until his sudden death aged sixty-five in 1939. The estates were an adjunct not a fulfilment of his life. The idea that landowning and government were two aspects of one vision had now pulled apart. What would become of the great A.T.?
There is one footnote to this Acland pre-history. In 1917, two years before Charlie’s death, he had given a lease for 500 years to the National Trust on what the Earl of Plymouth, Chairman of the Trust, a little airily called ‘seven or eight thousand acres’19 of Exmoor. The Aclands would continue to enjoy ‘the rents and profits and all the ordinary rights and powers of an owner’ but not the ability to develop the land. The acres were not being given away but this was a covenant and the Aclands were thinking of ‘visitors from afar’. It was, above all, a public signalling of benevolent intent. Charlie’s heir, Francis, thought it ‘Jolly to think it’ll all be national!’20
This was the shape of the inheritance – material, moral and political – which confronted the Acland who became central to their 20th century story. Richard had not been, as his mother had said in 1911, ‘at all huggly’ when a boy, ‘much less than his two brothers’.21 Bone thin and bird-like (his wife’s nickname for him was ‘Buzzard’, shortened to ‘Buckie’22), he was a taut, gawky, excitable and intelligent man. He was later described as ‘the kind of prefect who is not very good at games but makes up with it by force of character’.23
At first, Richard slid straightforwardly into the role the A.T. had prepared for him. He was to be the 15th Acland baronet; immediately after leaving Oxford in 1927, he therefore became a Liberal candidate. ‘I just regarded it as my job to put over the Liberal policy,’ he wrote later. ‘It was just an assumption that I was there to present the Liberal case.’24
Even with all the traditional Devon deference to Aclands, Richard lost at Torquay in 1929 and again two years later in Barnstaple. In 1935, he decided to approach the election with rather more vim. ‘Acland is the Man’, his election fliers said, and there was no doubting which side of the Acland dualism he had come down on. He was up against the squarest of Tories for the seat. ‘I’ve found out I do want to win the election,’ he wrote to Anne Alford, the young Architectural Association student he had fallen in love with,
just because I loath my opponent with an almost uncontainable loathing. A man who is ‘very agreeable to meet in conversation’ he has no character, no brains, no inspiration, no real concern in bettering the life of his country, plenty of money, & his wife has more, never had a job and never tried to have one, so bone stupid that he has decided the only thing he can do is go into Parliament … I do want to wipe the floor with him.25
Anne, an exceptionally strong-minded woman from a prosperous family – her parents lived in Cheyne Walk in Chelsea – was up to this trashing of the Tory enemy. ‘I do hope he loathes you back,’ she replied. ‘It’s so much more satisfactory.’ In a disastrous election for the Liberals, who were returned with only twenty-one members – there were over 100 Labour gains – Richard nevertheless won Barnstaple – by a squeak; no floorwiping – and became the ninth successive head of his family to take his seat in the House of Commons.<
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He had kissed Anne for the first time on 16 June 1935 and in April the next year they were married. She had contracted polio as a girl and perhaps in response to that crippling disease had developed a toughness and resolution that were perfectly capable of meeting the Acland strength of mind head on.
The early years of their marriage remain opaque. Before her death in 1994, Anne deposited their correspondence in the Devon Record Office, but she had weeded it heavily. Few letters survive from the late 1930s. Only later hints suggest that relations between her and Richard were not easy. ‘It’s an added marital suffering’, Richard wrote to her in September 1939, ‘that we may have to suffer a good deal for each other.’26 In April 1941, he could look back to a time ‘when it seemed quite possible it wouldn’t work’ as a difficulty they had overcome.27 His own combination of excitability, self-fascination, sense of destiny and a desire to make a splash cannot have been easy to live with; while her rather dogged need to control the lives of those around her would have made it difficult for her to follow where he led. He also had ‘a trademark snort-sniff’28 to which she became hyper-sensitized.
Certainties were not to hand. Liberalism was dying, the ground taken away from it by the polarized politics of the 1930s. As soon as Acland was elected, he started to drift left, visiting Spain and Czechoslovakia, meeting the intellectuals and activists of Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club and then at Easter 1938, while on holiday at Killerton, experiencing a moment of revelation, what he called an ‘imperative suggestion’ from an unknown source: ‘Politicians are wholly mistaken. People don’t need your pandering promises. They have to be told that if they want peace and better times they have to be better people.’29
Morality and politics were now fused in his mind. Political leadership looked to him like a kind of prophecy and the following year, as his first son, John, was born, Richard came to realize that the foundation for all he would do in his life would be the radical heart of Christianity. A version of Christian Socialism had been alive in the Acland family for almost a century and so Richard’s leftward move was no struggle, no rejection of what his family had long thought. Anne’s own radicalism had already been leading him this way. ‘There was a time when you were rather dissatisfied with my politics’, he would write to her early in 1940, ‘because you felt Socialism to be right and thought I was content with the policy of the Liberal Party, – so that may be what did it.’30
Just at this moment of conversion and radicalization, Richard’s father died and he inherited the vast lands and the title that went with them. The 33-year-old politician and his architect wife were now Sir Richard and Lady Acland. ‘Do you remember how depressed we were at the prospect of having titles?’31 Anne wrote to him two years afterwards, and their eldest son, John, later recalled that ‘they didn’t want the title, they didn’t want anything grand, it was just awful for them’.32
At the end of 1939, with this new predicament thrust upon him, Richard started writing his great testament, the book which would be published in February the following year as Unser Kampf: Our Struggle – one of the Penguin Specials which marked the beginning of the war and became part of the great national debate over the future of Britain and the world.
‘What, after all, are we fighting and sacrificing for?’ Acland asked.33 He plunged into the debate, feeling doubly qualified: not merely with his newly minted vision of a Christian commonwealth, but with the assumption, given him by the generations of Aclands standing behind him, that he would be heard. ‘It is the right and duty of the progressive’, he announced in the first pages of Unser Kampf, ‘not merely to give the people what they do desire, but to teach them what they should desire.’34 Britain was a wickedly unfair society, in which ‘1½ per cent of our population are drawing one quarter of the national income’.35 It was a world built on selfishness, riddled with inequality, envy, malice, greed and strife. There was one thing which lay at the root of all this pain: the private ownership of property. ‘Every fifty years, at the year of the Jubilee, which Jesus upheld, the land was reapportioned to the families, no matter who might have acquired it in the meantime.’36 That was the model which Britain now had to follow: ‘There is no ultimate reconciliation except in a system of common ownership.’37
The language of the grandee sometimes crept into the Jeremiads of the visionary. The inequality in modern Britain was ‘perfectly hideous’.38 Few sights were more nauseating than the petite-bourgeoisie:
Snug little men and women with comfortable little jobs or fortunate little investments which bring them in three or four hundred pounds a year deceive themselves, and, what is worse, disqualify themselves from taking a proper part in the councils of the nation, if they form a mental picture of a world mainly made up of snug little people living on three or four hundred a year.39
Coming from the owner of 22,000 acres of the West Country, with an annual rental income of over £30,000 a year,40 that doesn’t read comfortably. Nor does the wafting airiness of some of his propositions: ‘Would it not be rather wonderful to live in a world in which we did not all have to think about ourselves all the time?’41
His plan for world peace was little better:
To banish all risk of war for ever, let there be no more armies and navies and air forces ‘owned’ by individual countries. In this way, and this way only, shall we be saved from the fear of war. Here surely is an idea sufficiently majestic to stand on its own feet against all the maelstrom of world forces now unleashed.42
‘Ten thousand little know-alls will rush in to say it is not practical,’43 he wrote pre-emptively and in places the book was dismissed as an ‘uprush of warm-heartedness’,44 but Acland’s seriousness and conviction struck a chord. This was not a plea for economic equality, nor a Marxist vision of an essentially material world, but one in which it now seemed right that the dignity of self-possession, the mainstay of the gentry for centuries, should be extended to humanity as a whole. Property was a cheat, a denial of that dignity to others and, according to Acland, it was ‘the larger properties [which contained] the larger element of inheritance and swindling’.45 Only in common ownership could that institutionalized theft be eliminated and true neighbourliness re-created.
One of the ironies of this position, which sent shudders of anxiety through the more conventional West Country gentry, was its profoundly traditional nature, its vision of completeness derived from a golden age, when
No Fences parted Fields, nor Marks nor Bounds
Distinguish’d Acres of litigious Grounds:
But all was common, and the fruitful Earth
Was free to give her unexacted Birth:46
Richard Acland, whether he knew it or not, was as much of a Virgilian as any squire in this book.
Devon nevertheless was agog at the cuckoo of Killerton. As Richard wrote to Anne, he was getting reports of
intense discussion of ‘this man Acland’ in the county, but, you are not the humble little thing bobbing at the lodge gates. On the contrary, you are the villain of the piece, – … in fact it is strenuously argued that ‘if only he’d married someone in the county he would probably have developed quite normally.’47
This, he hoped, would make her ‘howl with something but I’m not sure what’.48
Unser Kampf was a massive and immediate success, selling through printing after printing. More than eight hundred letters came through his letterbox.
Having once made this public commitment to a grand theoretical vision of a new society, Acland could no longer be accommodated within the old political structures. The book’s proposals marked a break with anything the Liberal party could sponsor and it slowly became clear that Acland’s only possible political future lay in the foundation of a separate movement which would turn in time into a new political party, with Acland as its leader.
Enormous courage was needed for him to stick to his guns. In November 1940, at the opening of a new session of the House of Commons, as German bombers were deep into their camp
aign to destroy British cities and the morale of their inhabitants, and as the whole of Parliament was surging with emotional support for Churchill in the face of the German invasion fleet then gathered in the Channel ports, Acland had the temerity to stand up in Parliament and say:
We are in the hands of remote, well-satisfied mandarins far removed from our will. The people of Britain are being asked to make an immense sacrifice for the war. That sacrifice will not be forthcoming unless those who hold personal power over the economic life of the country are prepared to give it up. 49
Privately, he considered Churchill ‘a monster’.50
His life continued to polarize. In December, as bombs were falling on London, destroying Euston station and Sloane Square, Anne wrote to him from Devon, asking: ‘Have you fixed a shoot? Because you must. I think it had better be the Sat. before Xmas & have Audrey and Hedesman as well as the farmers. Tell me what you arrange.’51 At the same time, his followers and admirers were telling him that he was the natural leader of the ‘inarticulate’ mass of young people who needed ‘a Voice crying in the wilderness, where indeed they are. You are the Voice.’52
In January 1941 Richard received his call-up papers and joined the Royal North Devon Yeomanry not as an officer but as a soldier in the ranks, relishing the escape from his class identity. As he wrote to Anne, he couldn’t ‘get over being an ordinary person,’ disparaging ‘the fools who think its worth struggling to preserve all the things which prevent them being ordinary people …’53
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