I’ve never enjoyed any new suit as much as the uniform … It really is rather fun to go in to a country pub without knowing that everyone there will notice one’s smart clothes with resulting 50 per cent drop in the general matey-ness of the atmosphere.54
It is difficult to think that Acland could ever pass for anything he was not. In a piece for the Partisan Review, George Orwell skewered him on his unsheddable class mannerisms. Acland was
not in any way a man of the people. Although of aristocratic and agricultural background (he is a fifteenth baronet) he has the manners and appearance of a civil servant, with a typical upper-class accent. For a popular leader in England it is a serious disability to be a gentleman, which Churchill, for instance, is not. [Sir Stafford] Cripps [then leader of the House of Commons] is a gentleman, but to offset this he has his notorious ‘austerity’, the Gandhi touch, which Acland just misses in spite of his ethical and religious slant.55
From a more private and forgiving perspective, Anne encouraged him:
The village is divided into those who think it’s wonderful of you to have gone into the ranks, those who think it’s Mad Acland, & those who think it’s frankly indecent. ‘’T’isn’t right for Sir Richard to be sitting down at the same table as my Tom might be’ as Marjory said. Proportions are about 4:2:1.56
How does one look at this man seventy years later? Was this posturing, a game played by the profoundly privileged, toying with the sensations of a virtuous simplicity, a Petit Trianon of the self, thinking property irrelevant because he had so much, doing what his ancestor Sir Thomas four generations back had done, tossing off acts of ‘benevolent careless self-indulgence’? Or was this a claim on deep principle, an engagement with the possibilities of a good society by a man whose entire family culture had led him to this point? Was it vision or self-regard? Was Richard Acland’s career a monument to love or self-love?
The war forced Richard and Anne Acland to lead largely separate lives. Their correspondence is full of regret, of each missing the other. Sometimes she felt ‘how utterly tasteless life is without you’;57 sometimes she told him to ‘try & wash all over as much as you can & not sleep in all your clothes.’58 He re-iterated his love for and devotion to her: ‘As time goes on I want you more & more & feel more angry with the whole war for robbing us of each other.’59
But there was also the feeling that each of them was pursuing their natural bent, on separate and parallel paths: he increasingly busy with the often febrile creation of the new movement; she with the running of the Devon and Somerset estates and their own family. It was a role that started to grow on her. ‘I hate being Lady Acland when I am not in Devonshire,’ she wrote to him in April 1941, after visiting her brother. This was an extraordinary and inadvertent confession. In Devon the socialist architecture student had become Lady Acland. ‘It seems natural there & I don’t think about it but it’s horrid being my-ladied by Billy’s maid.’60
She got pregnant again on one of his visits home, but the management work continued. Tom Jeffrey, the Killerton agent, told her that the estate masons were being ‘lazy’: ‘(He would.) I have had a nice long morning in the office & have things in hand.’61 ‘Mrs Glen has left Dr Glen after a frightful midnight row involving jug throwing and the village policeman’,62 but for all that Devon
really does feel like home to me now. Today Waifs and Strays Committee, tomorrow rent audit & I am more and more glad that you are not home this week. We will have a heavenly time when you do come with peaceful pregnant picnics in the bluebells.63
He often told her of his triumphs at meetings and rallies and she replied, a little lonely:
How I wish that I could just invent some story of overhearing somebody saying I was absolutely marvellous but I can’t. However I am very glad you did darling & I happen to think you are too, so there. I feel quite extra fond of you tonight.64
They were playing their traditional gentry roles. Richard was promoting his great idea, persuading business to back it, gathering supporters, travelling the country, canvassing cities in the north of England and in Wales – ‘What an amazing thing to be living and bringing up children at a time like this,’65 he wrote to her – while she was ‘spending every morning in the estate office, & every afternoon going round the estate men and round the farms’.66 There were 30 estate staff, 30 farm tenants and 120 cottage tenants to see to. ‘Wages were paid every fortnight from a Gladstone bag fetched by myself from the bank.’67 But she was also falling in love with the ‘red Devon cattle and the cream cob walls’68 of these damp and fertile valleys.
She suspected the Holnicote manager wasn’t telling her everything he should, worried about the estate saw mill, bought seventy-six presents at Christmas for the estate children, thought of handing over the private Acland schools at Holnicote to the County Council and was always looking to the bottom line. In 1941–2, after all costs had been deducted, Holnicote and Killerton ended up making a profit of £1,300. Richard had paid no attention and apologized to her:
I’m wondering if you are feeling pretty peaved about anything because quite honestly I think you have every right to be if you aren’t, because although it was something that we mentioned on the telephone, I didn’t write a word about the £1300 profit on the estate. I do think it incredibly good …69
‘Someday,’ the innumerate Acland told his wife, ‘I must get someone to explain the whole business from the start in words of two syllables …’70
In the summer of 1942, Richard merged his new movement, called ‘Forward March’, with the ‘1941 Committee’, a similar group around J.B. Priestley, to form Common Wealth, a political party in all but name, committed to common ownership and a moral vision of politics which embraced the idea that individual ambition and desire should come second to the needs and requirements of the community. The three large parties in the wartime coalition had entered a pact not to compete against each other in by-elections. Common Wealth was not bound by that truce and the prospect opened up of their winning by-election seats as they arose. ‘I’ve never known a more tense or exciting situation,’ Richard wrote to Anne in April. ‘I am wonderfully hopeful.’71 The old loathed political establishment might now begin to suffer:
It is rather beastly of me, but after all these years of looking at the smug confident faces of those men who can’t think of the possibility of their not being the ruling class, I do wish I’d seen them when the first shadow of impending defeat spread across their path.72
It was a form of visceral hatred more appropriate to the 1640s than the 1940s, but moderate accommodation was scarcely Acland’s style.
The two realms of their lives, the West Country estates and Richard’s national political ambitions, now began to converge. Money was the motivating factor. If Common Wealth was to fight a series of by-elections, it needed funds to set up an organization in the constituencies. At the same time, the Acland family advisers were worrying about the impact of death duties on the estates. The tax on death had been introduced in 1894 and raised to 10 per cent in 1910 by the Liberal chancellor, David Lloyd George, one of Arthur Acland’s protégés. Since then it had risen to 20 per cent and was now in danger of eroding the great inheritance. It was only sane to do something about it.
Through 1942, the Aclands slowly picked their way through this double problem. ‘Unless we do put by for death duties we shall certainly have to sell Killerton or Holnicote next time,’ Anne wrote to Richard in February.73 Should he insure his life to create a death duty fund? The question was asked against the rather awkward background of Richard’s campaign to rid the country of all private property. Anne had her answer:
If the system changes, well & good & the whole thing will be forfeited anyway but if this system should go on, the two estates might just as well be owned by us as by some horrible absentee speculator … I found a celandine in bud yesterday.74
Her attachment to the estates, and perhaps to the standing that came with them, was deepening even as his vision of
a new world was opening before him. But they could at least be united, from their divergent points of view, against the unspeakable vulgarity of the ‘horrible absentee speculator’. The deep Christian socialist and the increasingly gentrified estate manager could hold hands over that particular form of snobbery.
Anne was certainly under strain that summer. Exeter had been blitzed in May and all the estate records destroyed in the solicitor’s office where they were kept. She was having to copy them all out again from the tenants’ own agreements. A bombed-out family of six was living with them at Sprydon, their house on the Killerton estate, and sniping at her for the way she looked after her own children. Her hay fever and migraines were getting worse. Ethel, the nanny who looked after the young boys, was called up and Anne was left with no help.
By the end of June 1942, the Aclands had managed to agree on a plan. They would sell five farms, the beautiful quintet of Hindon, Wydon, Wilmersham, Buckethole and Stoke Pero, all on the borders of the Holnicote estate in Somerset, as well as the Falcon Hotel at Bude in Cornwall and two further farms near it. Marginal properties were to be cashed in so that the ancient core could be preserved. The money generated would pay for death duties, investment in the estate and what was rather grandly called ‘education policy’ – school fees for their sons. ‘I feel fairly sure myself that the money will be more use to us than the farms,’ Richard wrote to Anne. ‘The real body of the estate proper will not suffer by their loss.’75 Not much evidence in those words of the gospel of common ownership. ‘I think the policy which I suggest will be so much more fun – and much more satisfying – for you, and, if politics turn bad on me, for me, than the death duty insurance plan.’76
And yet, alongside all this, in this crucial letter from Richard to Anne written on 30 June 1942, there are signs of his sensing a divergence between them.
I think we have, now, a fairly high determination to make a good show of the estate. At the moment this determination is in you, rather than in me; and if politics go in such a way as to take up most of my life, I think this will perhaps always be so.77
‘Changes in the war and in politics are affecting my feelings about the estate too,’ he wrote a little ominously, ‘and a lot of things are tied up together … Taking the much longer term view of the potential developments does mean to me that the long term problems of the estate become very much more real and alive to me.’78
Despite these inner rumblings, the future must have looked pretty settled to Anne and the advisers. The Acland inheritance was to be secured. But there was a problem: this solution could provide no money with which to further the fortunes of Common Wealth, which was then, as it would be for the rest of its life, desperate for cash. Besides, it was inherently and philosophically unstable for Richard Acland to be feathering his ancestral nest while saying the sort of things he was saying in public. In The Forward March, a sequel to Unser Kampf, he had written this:
Whatever there is of hardship before us, that we will share; whatever there is of toil, that we will share; whatever there is of gaiety in our struggle – and there will be much – that, too, we will share; and in the years to come, years after all not so far distant that we may not ourselves hope to see them, years when we shall have rebuilt this land fairer and nobler than it was before, why then all that there is in it of wellbeing, that too we will share.79
There was not much room in that for ‘avoid the taxes’, ‘secure the estates’ or ‘plan for the school fees’. He was in a muddle.
Here, though, at the critical juncture, the record fails. Between mid-summer 1942 and January 1943, next to nothing has been preserved in the Acland archive. Anne destroyed it all. All that remains is a single-page document written by John Acland, Richard’s and Anne’s eldest son, in the 1970s and annotated by Anne in 1981. It is now in the Devon Record Office, and known to the Aclands as Anne’s ‘Final Testament’. It consists of little more than hints and suggestions but it is the best evidence for what happened at the great crisis of their lives. Like the tradition from which it emerged, the story is a complex, woven and plaited thing.
Until the beginning of October, ‘there was no idea of getting rid of the estate in anybody’s mind’.80 Richard then came home to Sprydon for the weekend of 8–11 October 1942. Common Wealth was in dire financial straits. ‘It is suggested that estates are sold & money given to C.W.’ Acland was removing the muddle at a single blow. His life from now on would be one of singular integrity. ‘A[nne] resists very strongly. Period of wrangling till Xmas. The estates are important not only as property: they are communities of people for whom she feels responsible. It can be assumed that letters about this have been destroyed.’81
The arguments between them were undoubtedly bitter and brutal. The evidence is a letter written by Richard to Anne in January 1943, after the Sturm und Drang was over and they had come to some kind of reconciliation. He was waiting for the train that would take him back to Westminster:
Taunton waiting room
5 January 1943
I can’t tell you how much I’m glad to hear you say so firmly that we won’t live our lives apart. I’m sure for us and the children this is more important than any other decision we could possibly make.82
She had threatened to leave him over this, playing as her stake the family’s happiness and the survival of their marriage against his drive for political significance.
What exactly had happened is not clear but it is likely that through the autumn and early winter they had been at war. All year, politically, Acland had been driving ever further from the Churchill-loving consensus, saying at the London conference of Common Wealth that ‘the war was being conducted by men who regarded it as an unfortunate interruption to business life’. Others at the conference described Churchill as ‘the leader of the party of privilege and stupidity’. Only they understood the necessary place of goodness in national life. ‘Political and economic decisions must be governed by morality instead of expediency.’83 It is possible that for Lady Acland, confronting the daily management decisions of the estates, this grandstanding was exasperating.
After Christmas, Richard and Anne went for five days together to Mevagissey on the Cornish coast to work things out. Anne’s 1981 final testament says as much:
During this period I am sure that we hit upon the idea of giving the estates to the NT, reserving some cash to buy a London house for after the war and give a considerable sum to CW. This compromise satisfied R’s scruples about private property and my own concern for the long-term well-being of the estates. Having come to this decision we presented a united front to everybody without pretence & have always maintained it.84
But it wasn’t quite as neat as that. Papers in the National Trust archive reveal that as early as October 1942, the Trust opened negotiations with the Aclands to buy the freehold on the 6,000 acres of Holnicote land which Charlie had leased to them in 1917.85 Richard Acland sent the Trust a valuation for this land in the course of November and in December the Trust decided to buy it, even if at a price lower than Acland had offered.86
The critical point is that the National Trust was already in the frame before the Cornish holiday, not as the possible recipient of a gift but as a buyer of land at commercial values. In February the following year, in widespread publicity from which the National Trust and the Aclands both emerged glowing with virtue, the entire transaction was portrayed as a gift. Richard’s own statement, reported in the Guardian on 27 February 1943, was explicit:
What we are doing is … the only thing which can keep the estates together as they are now and prevent them from being spoiled at any time. I do hope that nobody will think that giving them away is any very terrific thing. It is an extraordinarily small thing in comparison with thousands and thousands of people all over the world who are at this moment willing to give their lives.87
A leader in the same paper made the convenient political point:
Sir Richard, who comes of a public-spirited and Liberal line,
has chosen to give all while it is still unspoiled to the nation, to let it enter – to play on the name of the new party he leads – into the ‘common wealth’ of his fellow-countryman.88
The Observer the following Sunday said it was ‘thanks to the generosity’ of Sir Richard Acland that ‘a great expanse of fertile and beautiful soil’ was now ‘a piece of common wealth’.89 ‘I do think this whole business comes at a very good moment politically,’ Anne wrote to him that week.90
But it was not entirely a gift; it was a mixed bag, part gift and part sale. A rough outline of the deal had been agreed in January 1943 before the announcement, but its details continued to be worked out through the year that followed. There were one or two obstacles to overcome. First, the debts: £21,000 of death duties still owing on Richard’s father’s estate, plus £11,000 accumulated debt. (For corresponding 2011 sums, multiply these figures by 100 – a total debt equivalent to £3 million.) Acland also needed between £7,000 and £10,000 for a London house suitable for a party leader (2011: £700,000 to £1 million). Common Wealth, which won its first by-election in April, needed large amounts of money and the boys had to be educated. Various sums were in play but by the autumn the arrangements had come clear. The National Trust would have to commit £178,000 to the acquisition of the Acland lands, a total it could reduce to £134,000 (2011 equivalent c.£13.5 million), by then selling off the Bude estates for £44,000.91
Richard Acland’s champions in public could inadvertently find themselves coming near the bone. ‘It is particularly satisfactory that there have been so many gifts to the Trust during the war’ – Beatrix Potter had just left the organization 4,000 acres in the Lake District – the Guardian leader writer said in February 1944,
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